Overview of Indie Film Fundraising

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The Product

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Design Process for Indie Film Fundraising

Double Diamond Framework

In each sprint, I develop prototypes that undergo further testing to ensure the solution supports the user experience. Design thinking draws influence from cross-team collaboration in an agile UX workflow environment.

1st Sprint

Qualitative data was gathered via interviews with concept testing to refine the visual brand identity with alignment toward accessibility standards. Then, the digital presence was overhauled with a new brand style guide, refreshed copy, and streamlined user flows.

2nd Sprint

We gathered quantitative data through surveys and data analytics to ensure that we reach our target audience with intentional allocation of our marketing budget.

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UX Research

Research Objectives

Since the goal is to attract supporters of our story, it was important to go into discovery and emerge with an understanding of these concepts better. We used these insights to adapt our digital content, brand, and marketing strategy. ♟️

Considerations

Understand how we attract our target audience.

Clarify why we draw in our target audience.

Understand how we can utilize KPI (engagement, advertising, etc.) to garner their support via donations and volunteering.

How are people engaging with it?

Why are people engaging with it?

Is engagement sustained? Why or why not?

Be mindful of assumptions: Short-term engagement that results in donations leads us to our goal faster than sustained engagement without financial commitment.

Who is donating and why?

Is there a benefit to reaching out to non-donors?

Understand how to re-brand in alignment with target audiences (including visual and cognitive accessibility standards).

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Heuristic Evaluation

The Acro Documentary team built an existing website and Instagram when they brought me on to help. Thus, conducting a heuristic evaluation of the website became an initial order of business.

This process uncovered key changes for re-design:

Make the navigation bar sticky to resolve usability shortcomings.

Edit UX copywriting to correct errors, contextualize indie filmmaking, and organize info architecture into clear user flows unified throughout the customer journey. Consider adding a Privacy Policy and Contact page.

Resolve visual hierarchy/prominence issues with better consideration for screen reader users. 

👀 Beyond the visual hierarchy issues, there’s a key error in the body copy that could severely stifle users from donating to the Acro Doc Project. Do you see it? Hint: ssǝɹpp∀ lᴉɐɯƎ ǝɥʇ ʞɔǝɥƆ

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Interviews

Initially, research objectives and interview questions were developed to clarify our target audience’s values, motivations, and pain points to create personas. Findings from user interviews are accounted for in affinity maps to ensure the customer journey supports people with or without a background in acro yoga or indie filmmaking.

How?

With help from the team, prior donors were recruited and then I interviewed remotely. To get prospective supporter feedback, participants who have yet to donate to the Acro Documentary Project were also recruited and interviewed remotely.

Half of the UX interview participants are actively involved in the acro yoga community while the other half do not but admire the practice. For best results, diverse participants vary in age, gender, ethnicity, country of residence, etc.

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Brand Concept Testing

🧑‍🦯 Chris Jeckel is one of four voices telling the story in Touching the Sky. He is a blind acrobat, lawyer, film producer, and champion of DEI initiatives. Producers agree that it’s essential for the details in the color palette, typography, and voice to reflect our brand values. While the initial color scheme was light and gave partly cloudy/blue sky vibes that felt like Touching the Sky, it posed a challenge for color contrast ratios. 🌤️

How?

White text on a light blue background doesn’t pass W3CAG color contrast ratios for visual accessibility.

Digital designs are using too many fonts in violation of cognitive accessibility standards. Some fonts are distinctly full of character but hard to read.

SEO split between the two brand names: Touching the Sky and Acro Documentary Project. To prevent it from being watered down, we can consolidate our brand identity by using Touching the Sky Film: The Acro Documentary.

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Quantitative Data

The team had the feeling that our target audience is primarily young women who have ties to the health and wellness industry. Initially, we imagined that many are climbers, dancers, or have other tangental hobbies. To find out for sure, we did market research through Survey Monkey and used data analysis of metrics from Facebook ads.

Demographics Tracked

Gender

Age

Activities

Profession

Touching the Sky Film Impressions

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UX Research Take-Aways

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UX Ideation

Personas

Before affinity mapping, the preliminary personas envisioned were acro enthusiasts and non-acro practitioners who appreciate the storylines or educational components. Another noteworthy split in our target audience is cinephiles (perhaps some with industry knowledge) and more casual viewers who may not know the ins and outs of film production. Research affirmed this and deepened our understanding of what motivates each individual to contribute to our cause.

How?

Discussing acro yoga without too much jargon is crucial to align both personas. We need to use terms that translate to transcend the physical practice and point to the metaphysical elements that all humans can understand, such as trust, communication, and collaboration.

It was a pleasant surprise to hear that most of our user research participants hadn’t encountered many pain points while interacting with our brand. However, the primary concerns center around closed-off social media engagement that doesn’t welcome collaboration, rag-tag fundraising events, and potential donors not knowing where their money is going.

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UX/UI Design

User Flow

When considering the user flow, it is essential to remember the importance of a sales funnel that directs users toward charitable donations to indie film fundraising. However, the conundrum uncovered in UX research underscores users’ lack of interest in being sold/advertised without proper rapport and connection building. The amount of “skin in the game” each persona has varies depending on their knowledge of the acro yoga community and independent film production. Thus, the information architecture, body copy, and content are reorganized and further fleshed out.

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Customer Journey

Ultimately, the objective throughout the customer journey is to inform, instill confidence, and inspire action. We want to make our users empathize with the struggles of independent film production and understand how important they are to the fundraising process so they are motivated to get involved.

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UI & Brand Design

A new style guide was crafted and concept-tested to address inaccessible UI and brand design shortcomings.

Feedback from concept-testing

Limit ourselves to a single sans-serif font. Since Poppins was already in use on our website and aligned with our brand values, we kept it. Therefore, this change beautifully supports cognitive diversity, which is often disproportionately represented within the circus community.

8% Increase in product visibility by adhering to color contrast ratios without diminishing the existing branding of being “up in the clouds.” This was challenging because the sky and clouds are both light hues, but we were able to achieve greater readability by never placing images behind text again.

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Usability Testing

Using Figma, a mid-fidelity wireframe prototype was constructed for usability testing. The user flow for donation collection was tested after recruiting usability testers who represent our target audience (by having a vested interest in healthy living). Usability testing yielded a 100% success rate and affirmed the UXR insights about the website’s efficacy. “But people aren’t going to find the website unless they find it through an avenue, which probably would be social media,” says a UXR participant with extensive experience in digital marketing and acro.

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Conclusion

Next Steps for Indie Film Fundraising

The foundation is set now that we have clear personas, user flows, and a unified customer journey. However, since users in our target audience will need a means of connecting to our project via the website, our work in social media marketing is just beginning. We’ve created a Facebook and linked it to the existing Instagram. We’ve created an Official Touching the Sky Film YouTube Channel and embedded teaser clips/trailers within our website to support SEO, LinkedIn, and beyond. In essence, now we need eyes on it!

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Learnings from Indie Film Fundraising

Despite entering this project with nearly a decade of experience working with non-profit fundraising, I have learned so much about the independent film production process and its specific needs for donations!

For instance, Touching the Sky Film: The Acro Documentary accepts donations in the form of frequent flyer miles, hotel credits, and catering, which differs from some other 501(C)(3)s I’ve worked for. This contextualizes a relevant pain point uncovered in UX Research: users don’t always know who is in charge, like on the donations page where it doesn’t provide a point of contact for alternative types of donation.

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Resources

Stickers fromAccessibility considerations informed by W3C.