Charity Navigator

Charity Navigator is the largest independent nonprofit evaluator, helping millions of people find and support charities that match their passions and values. Its website and visual identity had fallen behind, and it wanted both reimagined: more modern, more trustworthy and easier to use.

I was the lead UX designer, working with a program manager, a product manager, a business analyst, three junior-to-mid UX designers, four web developers, a UX researcher, a content designer and a QA engineer. We had eight months to go from zero to launch, reporting to Charity Navigator's CEO, CMO, CTO and Head of Product & Design.

The constraints were real: a tight budget, backend limitations, a lot of stakeholders, and an organization still early in its design and technology maturity. Part of the job was breaking down silos so the team could move fast without cutting quality.

I led two weeks of discovery workshops with the CEO, CMO, CTO, Head of Product & Design and Head of Fundraising to pin down business goals, user needs and what success should look like for each group of users.

A MoSCoW exercise (must, should, could and won't have) surfaced five themes for the new experience: transparency, personalization, interactivity, guidance and simplification. We defined the brand's personality together, then had stakeholders draft mission statements, vote on them and merge the winners into one guiding statement for the redesign.

With UX Research, we surveyed about 2,000 active donors, segmented by age, on how they give and how they felt about the existing site. The same group weighed in on features we were exploring, like comparing charities side by side or against an entire sector.

The survey shaped three personas, each with their own journey map: Oliver, a 20-year-old student with more time than money to give; Julie, a busy 36-year-old parent and entrepreneur who wants to set up recurring gifts; and Ted, a 66-year-old retiree who researches ratings and annual reports before he gives. Four themes guided the design:

• People want to help, whether by giving time or money
• Younger donors, 18 to 22, lean toward giving their time
• Most donors give more than once a month
• Donors want a quick, easy way to judge how transparent a charity is

We started at the whiteboard with three questions: how might we personalize and contextualize based on search, make it scientific and trustworthy, and keep it simple and intuitive? From there, every key page moved from sketch to wireframe to high-fidelity comp, for desktop and mobile:

• Search and menu — find charities by name or cause, or browse top categories, causes and locations
• Homepage — a cleaner front door into discovering charities
• Charity listings — results built for scanning and comparing
• Charity profiles — the overall score up front, broken down into impact, finances, leadership and culture, with donate, favorite and compare one tap away
• Donor accounts — a mapped-out, simpler path to creating an account

I partnered with UX Research on a moderated usability study with eight people who had donated through Charity Navigator in the past six months, across four age groups. We tested the homepage, discovering charities, donor basics, search, sign-in, donating and FAQs.

The redesign scored 4 or higher on a 1–5 Likert scale across the board. Even with scores that high, the sessions surfaced plenty of insights, and the designs kept moving through rounds of iteration, internal review, stakeholder review and testing.

Redesigned, built and launched a new website and brand experience in eight months. In the first four months after launch, web users grew 44% and revenue grew 28%, with more than 1.2 million monthly active users. The redesign went on to win a bronze Anthem Award.

Budget constraints ended our contract shortly after launch, but the design process is never really finished. The research, personas and designs gave Charity Navigator's team a foundation to keep listening and evolving on their own.