Rotary International's Custom CRM (Manage Membership Leads)
Timeframe
September 2020 - Present
My role
UX Designer
The team
1 product manager, 1 product owner, 1 business analyst, 11 engineers (in Pune, India), and 1 product designer (me)
Tools used for this project
Research, analysis, and user testing
Introduction
The manage membership leads product is a custom CRM for Rotary’s club presidents and district governors so they can follow up with and keep track of a potential candidate’s progress in order to join a Rotary club or other Rotary engagements. During its first iterations, it was clunky, poorly designed, and overall wasn’t adopted by many presidents or governors which resulted in many candidates not being followed up with and memberships declined. In the fall of 2020, the New Channels and Growth team set out to redesign the product to make it a delightful, modern application that would result in more candidates being followed up on, and in turn, membership rates would increase.
Problem statement
The original MML pages were devoid of a clear visual hierarchy, information architecture, and weren’t very user-friendly for our older user base. Hence the reason for club presidents and district governors not adopting something that made their everyday jobs to be done more difficult. This also resulted in candidates being left to the wayside. The question becomes how might we empower and regain our users' trust to adopt our MML page and use it in the way they want while making it simple, delightful, and uncomplicated to use?
Initial manage membership leads (previously in production)
A partial redesign was done by a colleague (previously in production)
Problem breakdown
📱Not responsive
The new channels and growth team never emphasized the importance of responsive design which users asked for as they use tablets and mobile phones to do quick searches or easy jobs to be done.
📺Dated design
The previous MML pages subscribed to very dated UI practices from a very limited tech stack with glaring usability issues.
⛓Disjointed experience
Information is hidden and follows poor UX principles which result in information not working together to give useful meaning and insight for potential candidates.
😤Frustrating workflows with no cohesive information architecture or visual hierarchy
Best practices for tables have come a long way and they aren't shown in the screenshots above. Sometimes, you need separate pages in order to properly organize information instead of an all-in-one-page approach.
The redesign
A clear and concise table with new candidates at the top.
User scenario
A club president receives an email saying he has new candidates and has to check up on some others that are in the process of becoming a member. This person has to scan across a large volume of names, trying to process who to prioritize first which could take a lot of time and effort.
Solution
New candidate filters at the top for quick action but a more robust filter on the table at their disposal. A club president can log in and instantly know what they need to start working on and do any follow-up tasks after.
9,620 candidates have been assigned to a district through Rotary.org between 1 July, 2021 - Jan,1 2022
An additional 293 were added through the recent “add a candidate” functionality at the club and district level
64% of membership candidates are reported to have been followed up on by the district, a 2-point improvement from Q1
Adding a new candidate couldn't be easier.
Past user frustration
A club president meets a new potential candidate and wants to add them to their club's membership leads. Before they would have to click 3 or more times in order to reach the "add a new member" CTA.
Solution
Now on the homepage of your membership leads page, you can add any pertinent information about a candidate and go back to working on another candidate's progress.
Introducing the 'candidate journey'.
User scenario
A club president has logged all the necessary information for a candidate and they want to add to a candidate's journey or others would like to view that candidate's journey log.
Solution
We introduced a candidate journey section where club presidents can log a candidate's membership progress. From contacting a member to a member attending a meeting, as well as a club extending a membership application, all the way to very club-specific journey processes. All instances of a candidate's journey, along with any notes and attachments, would be logged in the candidate journey section along with who committed to those logs.
Outcome
Part of the crux of working at Rotary International is that they either don’t have enough resources in terms of technical knowledge and/or manpower, or different teams own certain products that later hinder the growth of another team. In this instance, it’s a combination of both. We came to find out that part of where the MML would live is built on React and our development team in Pune is not trained in React, nor do they own the product to even make the necessary edits. But, because I work with an awesome and relentless team, we decided to implement incremental steps that are still going on to this day.
Where we are today
