Open Collective Crowdfunding Redesign

We are embarking on a journey to redesign our crowdfunding experience, and we want to do it together with you.

How can we create a better crowdfunding experience for our community? What do informative collective profile pages look like? How do we tell better money stories and what affects does this have on contributors and on your crowdfunding outcomes?

We are beginning this work by focusing on redesigning the public facing profile pages that drive engagement and contributions from the public.

How are we going to do this?

In order to reduce disruption, while making the changes we know are long overdue, we will gather ample feedback and bring you all along for the journey. We will be posting regular updates here on the blog and are open for feedback on a dedicated discord channel.

Through these mediums we will:

1. Work in the open. We are going to share as early as possible our thoughts and intentions. Instead of releasing a new design a few months from now, we are going to publish our thoughts, validate our assumptions, share our designs and test our prototypes.
2. Release trial versions. Our early releases will allow you to preview the new designs within your collectives without changing the public facing user experience.
3. Collective working group. We are also reaching out to selected collectives to form a small working group of collective admins who are advanced platform users and are willing to invest more time and attention to work closely with us throughout the process.

Current Frictions

There are a few major problems that we are setting out to address:

1. Differentiating between profile types. All the profiles on the platform look the same (collectives, projects, events, fiscal hosts, organizations, funds, etc.). This makes it difficult for a contributor to identify where they are and what they are seeing.
2. None of these profiles look clearly like fundraisers. Many profiles do not create a compelling crowdfunding experience with a clear call-to-action to contribute (especially those using more advanced features).
3. Unclear relationship between a collective and its projects and events. For collectives that use projects and events the relationship between these profile pages is unclear. As a result, it can be difficult for contributors to identify opportunities to contribute.
4. Weak Goals. Goals are common and expected in a crowdfunding. On Open Collective goals are often implicitly recurring and this is not expressed clearly enough on the platform. We would like to improve goal behavior so that they can play a more central role in the platform crowdfunding experience.
5. Information overload. The current profile pages pack a lot of information much of which does not clearly support the crowdfunding experience.
6. Weak collective narrative. Collectives that have been active on the platform for a while have a story to tell. The collective story is there hidden among the contributions, added funds, expenses and updates. It is a testament to the longevity and sustainability of the collective. We want to make it more visible.

Validating Our Assumptions

In the initial phase of the project we would like to test the following assumptions:

1. Two profiles are better than one. Our current profile pages are trying to do two things at once: crowdfunding and story-telling. The result is a complex page that provides a mediocre experience on both fronts. Both are valuable functions that need to be separately addressed.
2. Collectives manage money in accounts. Projects and events may seem, on the surface, like different things, but fundamentally they are both accounts within a collective, that have designated purposes through which collective raise and spend money. Making this more clear and accessible will enable collectives to make better use of the platform.

What Next

We are assuming that it will be easier for collective admins to relate to our proposals by seeing how they apply to their collectives. We have therefore begun building prototypes that will let you “try on” these ideas and see how they fit your collectives:

1. A fundraiser profile you will be able to try out on your collectives, projects and events.

2. A collective profile you will be able to try out on your collectives.

3. A dashboard “accounts” tool you will be able to activate in your dashboard.