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With an outdated and slow tech stack, Aegis spun up a new team to start rebuilding key features of their CRM, with a plan to replace it.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
The Story Begins With The
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
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
Understand and document nonprofits from an A-Z standpoint
Run customer discovery interviews and surveys around general topics and specific problems
Create diagrams, personas, IA, experience maps, journey maps, and storyboards for various purposes
Aid in product-development process documentation for larger company and board to understand
Host ideation workshops with key stakeholders, engineering, and sister companies
Prototype and test ideas with customers and actors in the market
Iterate on prototypes while producing documentation and requirements for engineering hand off
Collaboratively produce vision documentation and narrow down the CRM rebuild to feasible MVP
Participate in daily, weekly, and monthly Scrum ceremonies, often suggesting ideas around how to improve
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.
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.
Customer interviews and sister agency interviews were performed to identify key processes, pain points, tasks, workflows, and other information.
Other research alongside user interviews informed personas and their journeys within the nonprofits.
A survey was shared with customers and other industry professionals to quantify large problem areas and identify potential focus areas for 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.
Concept Test: Donor Profile
Feedback Gathered:
Concept Test: 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
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
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
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
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.
Surveys to Aid Feature Prioritization
One-Pager to Capture Market Interst and Input
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:
Prototyping & Testing
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.
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.
Direct mail processing customers were interviewed and a particular value for the tool was realized, albeit not what was originally assumed.
Rough personas were created to align the team and I repurposed the analytics mockups to hold concept validation sessions and iterate on a direction.
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
Validation Prototype
Experience Mockups
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.
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.
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