care-hero

Aegis Care

Launching a Product for Nonprofits  & Generating $100K in MRR

With an outdated and slow tech stack, Aegis spun up a new team to start rebuilding key features of their CRM, with a plan to replace it. Over time, this resulted in the launch of Aegis Care, a new product offering for nonprofits containing scanned images of processed donations that nonprofits can access on the fly. At a cheap 1.5 cents per mail piece processed, nearly every processing client of Aegis signed up to gain access to the tool, ultimately generating $100K in MRR.

Role:
• Problem Definition
• Industry & Market Research

• User Research & Testing

• Product 
Design
• MVP Definition

• Product Management
• Product Marketing

Domain
CRM & Data Processing

Timeline:
1 Year

Launched:
2019

The Story Begins With The

Original Objectives & Goals

Project Background

–> Reconstruct nonprofit CRM
–> 15+ years of engineering efforts
–> Original engineers left company
–> Built on legacy technologies
–> No product arm in organization
–> Relied on customer requests
–> Financially backed by Enterprise

Image displaying the user interface for the legacy CRM to be rebuilt

legacy-crm-device-mock

Key Goals

–> Build sustainable and maintainable technology
–> Streamline UX and modernize interface
–> Improve customer retention
–> Compete in market 
–> Garner trust of sister companies
–> Increase YoY ARR by attracting large customers

The Team

–> Technology team of 20 people
–> I was hired to lead and scale design
–> Enterprise leadership wanted measurable progress in a year
–> Worked with Product Owner and 5-10 Engineers
–> Regular discovery and testing sessions with 10+ customers
–> Collaboration with customers, team, and sister companies

Some of My Roles Throughout The Process

icons8-glossary

Understand and document nonprofits from an A-Z standpoint

icons8-collaboration-3

Run customer discovery interviews and surveys around general topics and specific problems

icons8-flow_chart

Create diagrams, personas, IA, experience maps, journey maps, and storyboards for various purposes

icons8-sprint_iteration

Aid in product-development process documentation for larger company and board to understand

icons8-project_management

Host ideation workshops with key stakeholders, engineering, and sister companies

icons8-call_to_action-1

Prototype and test ideas with customers and actors in the market

icons8-process_improvement

Iterate on prototypes while producing documentation and requirements for engineering hand off

icons8-strategy

Collaboratively produce vision documentation and narrow down the CRM rebuild to feasible MVP

icons8-teamwork

Participate in daily, weekly, and monthly Scrum ceremonies, often suggesting ideas around how to improve

Diving Headfirst Into The Problem Space

Understanding The Nonprofit Industry

With many new hires across the company, including the CEO, VPs, engineers, customer support, and more, Aegis needed a resource for employees to cultivate an understanding of nonprofits and fundraising. I worked with the CEO to create a Nonprofit A-Z document that aided everyone in grasping nonprofit operations, terminology, and fundraising.

aegis-az-nonprofits

Mapping Out the Legacy Product for MVP Scoping

To better understand the scope of replacing the CRM system, I worked with our product owner, VP of engineering, and several lead engineers to break down the various product features into functional areas. We then leveraged t-shirt sizing to scope and build an understanding of what timeline it may take to rebuild the entire system.

aegis-legacy-product-mapping

Exploratory Research to Discover Specific Problem Areas

Customer interviews and sister agency interviews were performed to identify key processes, pain points, tasks, workflows, and other information.

aegis-research

Defining Personas and their Journeys within Nonprofit CRMs

Other research alongside user interviews informed personas and their journeys within the nonprofits.

aegis-persona-journeys

Qualifying Big Problems & Honing In On an MVP

A survey was shared with customers and other industry professionals to quantify large problem areas and identify potential focus areas for an MVP.

aegis-problem-qual

Molding an MVP

I worked with the team to set up ideation workshops and hold sessions around what the first MVP iteration could be. These sessions were used to generate hi-fidelity early concepts that were then brought to testing with customers and other industry professionals to vet MVP solution directions.

aegis-workshops

Concept Test: Donor Profile

aegis-donor-profile

Feedback Gathered:

  • Would be useful for donor relations

  • Not super useful for fundraising initiatives

  • No reason to pay extra money for a prettier profile

  • Curiosity about the moves management piece and how it plays a larger role.

Concept Test: Moves Management

aegis-moves-management

Feedback Gathered:

  • This is already what we are doing for our customers today (sister companies who are fundraisers).

  • Nonprofits were excited about it, but didn’t like the idea of having limited tools integrated to start.

  • Some customers were already using Martech tools.

Concept Test: Vertical Benchmarking

aegis-benchmarking

Feedback Gathered:

  • This is already what we are doing for our customers today (sister companies who are fundraisers).

  • Nonprofits were excited about it, but didn’t like the idea of having limited tools integrated to start.

  • Some customers were already using Martech tools.

Sweet Spot: Fundraising Analytics & Segmentation

aegis-analytics

Feedback Gathered:

  • Questions about the pricing of analytics tools led to the discovery that customers paid $1,000 - $4,000 monthly for Excel reports, static slide deck reports, and lesser-value reporting options.

  • Demo of the basic concept garnered a lot of excitement.

  • The Big pitfall was operationalizing a plan based on this

Fabricating The Solution

After concept testing several different MVP approaches, qualitative and quantitative data was directing us toward building an analytics and segmentation platform that would provide nonprofits with greater insights as well as a tool to build direct mail segments on the fly.

Establishing MVP Focus & Defining a Larger Vision

aegis-mvp-focus

Attempting to Attain Testing Process Buy-In from Leadership

Getting something into the hands of people earlier rather than later to test prototypes and proofs of concepts.

aegis-process

Surveys to Aid Feature Prioritization

aegis-survey-prios

One-Pager to Capture Market Interst and Input

aegis-value-prop

A simple one-pager was formulated to socialize the concept of the new tool with customers, prospects, and sister companies for overall input and market interest. It elicited the new offering's capabilities to provide:

  • Visualized fundraising analytics that are integrated with live CRM data.

  • Data point filters to understand performance and build segmentation of certain touch points, donor groups, and more.

  • Measurements of different fundraising KPIs.

  • The ability to save filters and share links for easy reporting to executive teams.

 

Prototyping & Testing

aegis-analytics-1
  • As the project progressed forward, the product owner and myself often met with our sister companies to test basic functionalities.

  • The business didn’t want the product getting out into the world, so it was minimally exposed to clients after early validation sessions.

  • After months of work and getting a data sync set up with our CRM, we were close to piloting the platform before a major pivot.

Pivoting Toward Immediate Revenue

Aegis' CEO worked with our product owner and me to pivot to something with immediate revenue potential; Tools that could better serve our direct mail processing clients and help streamline operations.

icons8-mind_map

With many months of work left to get a data sync with our legacy CRM, we explored a tool to serve our direct mail processing facility's customers. 

icons8-collaboration-3

Direct mail processing customers were interviewed and a particular value for the tool was realized, albeit not what was originally assumed. 

icons8-contact

Rough personas were created to align the team and I repurposed the analytics mockups to hold concept validation sessions and iterate on a direction.

icons8-process

Within 2 months of pivoting, the tool started to roll out for beta testing and was released to all caging customers who opted into a new contract structure shortly after. This pivot helped the team deliver something valuable within the one-year commitment we voiced to our executive board, while also generating immediate revenue for the business.

Customer Personas & Experience Points

aegis-pivot-persona-1
aegis-pivot-persona-2
aegis-pivot-research-summary

Validation Prototype

Experience Mockups

aegis-dashboard-visuals
aegis-interactive-data
aegis-response-lookup
aegis-response-images
aegis-appeal-codes
aegis-program-types

Launching the New Product

-> Several campaigns went out over the new product concept.

-> All customers involved in discovery signed up for the tool or were champing at the bit to be included in the beta phase.

-> A welcome kit with functional instructions covering the tool was created and emailed to each customer user.

care-devices

Welcome Emails

A feature email series went out frequently during the first two months of use, keeping the tool in front of users and getting people to log into the tool daily.

aegis-email-welcome
aegis-email-mobile
aegis-email-high-dollar
aegis-email-changing-dates

Outcome:
$100K in MRR

The value of pivoting to providing a donation processing tool came from displaying captured images of the returned donations. Donor relations departments in nonprofits and the donation processing team saved time and money in manually looking up donation slips and obfuscating sensitive data.

–>Two large clients were landed at the caging facility and on the CRM system because of the innovative work being done.

–> Nearly 75% of caging clients opted into the platform at $0.015 per image and a monthly fee. Hundreds of thousands of pieces of mail are processed per day.

–> Customers received access to their direct mail donation data the day after it was processed and batches were closed, making it immensely easier for donor relations departments to follow up with high-dollar donors sooner.

$0.015

Price per image captured and stored

x 1.58M

Average processed donations per week

= $100K

Monthly Recurring Revenue

CODY THOMPSON
Colorado Product Designer  |  Currently Working Remotely for Storable