There are companies and organizations in our community that are struggling to improve life beyond the commercial sector. Most of them lack the expertise or the resources to improve their messaging or the usability of their products. Critical communication is lost in translation between the lines of their cluttered website. Their broken billing workflow is holding significant revenue hostage. A poorly designed engagement portal is deterring potential donors. What may come as second nature to you is not so obvious to the untrained eye, and the people trying to save the world are paying the price.
Here is the story of how I coupled my love for helping others with my passion for user experience to create a meaningful and lasting impact on both the nonprofit community and my career. The reach of your UX expertise is limitless and the benefits are sky high, so read on to learn how you can use your talents to make a difference on more than just the bottom line.
Rite of Passage into the World of UX Pro Bono
My own journey of UX enlightenment began with a seemingly simple conversation with my career coach. I was underutilized and wasn’t being challenged at work. I longed for my previous project manager position and didn’t hesitate to tell my coach. In return, she suggested I discover ways in which I could control my situation. The result cracked open my world and helped me find purpose.
She asked, “What are you missing from your old job and how can you incorporate that into what you’re doing today?” I knew the answer immediately. I missed running projects. I missed setting deadlines and schedules and collaborating with others to get things done. “But there’s something else,” she told me. “Every time you talk about giving back your face lights up.” And she was right. Even my friends noticed the bliss that volunteering offered me. But I didn’t work with nonprofits, I worked in user experience. So what could I do to connect these otherwise separate passions of mine without making a major career change?
My company, salesforce.com, donates 1 percent of our product to nonprofits, and 1 percent of revenue is fed back into the Salesforce Foundation in the form of grants and nonprofit funding. Also, every employee is encouraged to donate 1 percent of their time to organizations in need. It’s not uncommon for teams to paint playgrounds or feed the homeless as team-bonding activities. This 1/1/1 philosophy was ingrained in our company values early, which means years of evolution and a high rate of adoption among employees.
But I wanted to take it a step further. I enlisted the help of my colleague, Carol, our director of community and employee engagement. She’s on-point for connecting employees to pro bono and volunteer opportunities. Her expansive network proved invaluable when she introduced me to the nonprofit organization, Community Technology Network (CTN). CTN’s mission is to connect tech companies with the nonprofit world, and they were the perfect partner for what I had in mind for my first UX pro bono event.
We targeted November 8, which was World Usability Day, for our event. Our objective was to raise awareness of user research within the company and in the local nonprofit community. We decided to do so by volunteering our UX expertise to nonprofits that were lacking proper resources on staff. So in a celebration with usability professionals all over the world, my team provided fifteen nonprofits with feedback on how to make their websites more consumable.