Footbridge for Families

Secondary research

Understanding nonprofit websites and how Footbridge works

We conducted a literature review of what government and insurance administrators look for in websites and what makes nonprofits websites credible, a comparative analysis looking at other nonprofit websites and social media presences, and an expert interview with Kim, the CEO and founder of Footbridge with Families to understand how Footbridge works and how it is currently involved with government and insurance administrators.

Modeling

Making sense of our research

Synthesizing key insights

1. A website that communicates with clarity and specificity saves the time of potential contractors.

a. Contractors look for the communication of a clear mission that addresses a specific, well-researched gap and group of citizen communities.

b. Contractors quickly want to clearly understand a nonprofit’s model (what it does and how it works).

c. Clearly distinguishing between but also accommodating for all users with different goals and priorities decreases confusion and saves the time of users.

2. A nonprofit’s credibility is established through familiarity, transparency, and consistency.

a. Contractors value the diversity, capability, and history of the team behind the nonprofit a lot.

b. Contractors look for familiar team members, sponsors, and partner organizations when determining a nonprofit’s credibility.

c. Consistent visual design and branding add a lot of clarity and credibility to a nonprofit.

d. The history of a nonprofit, along with consistency in its operations over time with the people and resources it has available, makes a nonprofit more credible.

e. Transparency through specificity in testimonies, statistics, example impact scenarios, and other evidence adds to a nonprofit’s credibility. 

f. Transparency through clarity of financial involvement and capabilities adds to a nonprofit’s credibility.

3. Government agents and health insurance administrators look to form partnerships with nonprofits that are flexible and willing to give more agency to contractors.

a. Contractors value forming partnerships with nonprofits that have a history of flexibility and a willingness to be flexible.

b. Stakeholders want more agency over who they're impacting after giving aid.

Figuring out how to organize the content of the website into pages and sketching out initial ideas

Testing and iterating

Getting feedback on what does and doesn't work

We speed-dated our infographics with 7 participants to understand what can be clearly understood by someone unfamiliar with Footbridge. We realized that using an infographic to convey the entire model of Footbridge in one screen was too much information for a viewer, so we changed the homepage to a scrollable, step-by-step breakdown of how Footbridge works instead.

We conducted a think-aloud study with 6 participants on the prototype's usability and to understand if any content was missing. The feedback from these sessions helped us iterate on the prototype as we moved into higher-fidelity.

Reflection

1. Recruiting government and insurance administrators to test with was a struggle. Sometimes, we were able to work around this by testing with participants unfamiliar with Footbridge to see how well Footbridge's model was communicated, but it would be ideal to test with government and insurance administrators specifically to get feedback on the nuances of how they determine credibility. In the future, recruiting should be done earlier.

2. Balancing the needs of different audiences on the website was a challenging problem. It's important to differentiate between funders like the government and referral partners since they have very different goals in using the website. The best way to balance these differents needs is to get feedback from all groups at every stage—we could've done a better job of ensuring we considered everyone's thoughts in all stages of the design process.