How We’re Activating Our Users
by Dawn Winsor, Product Manager and Brett Grau, Director of Design @ Resilia — Activating nonprofit organizations is top of mind for Resilia. Read about the steps we’re taking so far to see it through.
When we think about the products we use in our daily lives, we don’t often consider how they became part of our routine.
In most cases, when we want to receive some value X, Product A comes to mind. In fact, it’s hardly even a thought at all, but rather, a natural gravitation — a habit, if you will.
But, what is it that gets us to this point? What if we were to consider the how behind it all…?
It’s not often we encounter a product and immediately start using it on a regular basis. Something usually needs to bridge that gap that causes us to consider Product A the next time we want to receive Value X.
This is the role of Activation.
Activation, for all intents and purposes, connects us — the user — to the value of a product by initiating a direct experience around it.
Once we experience this value firsthand, things are set in motion for us to come back and do it again. If that connection fails to exist or takes too long to establish, we’re likely to lose interest and move on. Because of this, it’s essential we’re activated early on when using any product for the first time. That is, of course, if the intention is for us — the user — to return.
Resilia offers a variety of services aimed to help nonprofit organizations increase their capacity. From bite-sized video courses to self-service tools to one-on-one coaching sessions with industry experts — everything we do is centered around our mission to “strengthen and uplift nonprofit organizations through long-term capacity building”.
A good portion of these services can be accessed through our Nonprofit Platform — a one-stop solution for nonprofit capacity-building needs. Primary users of this platform are founders and members of grassroots nonprofits looking to do just that.
However, as we touched on earlier, having this value simply live on the platform is not enough. It’s essential our users are activated, or connected, to it. With this in mind, we are striving to effectively and efficiently activate users early on in their Nonprofit Platform experience.
Considering the nature of the nonprofit industry and the multitude of areas a nonprofit organization needs to invest time and resources in order to strengthen its capacity, we’ve decided to consider a user (a nonprofit professional) to be activated on our Nonprofit Platform when one of 2 conditions occur:
- This user performs a single high-value action (HVA) for a second time
- This user performs a high spread of high-value actions (HVAs)
High-value actions on the platform include publishing a story about the impact they’re driving, adding data points to track progress on their quantifiable organizational goals, and bookmarking the profile of a Funder of interest.
To achieve our goals for activating new users we had four principles in mind as we were developing different ways to activate our users early on in the platform.
- Understand our user’s goals when entering the platform
By identifying our user’s goals and needs when they start engaging with the platform, we are able to target key moments to activate them in their journey. - Provide guidance toward additional value
Creating organic pathways to different features within the platform will allow our users to naturally lead themselves toward the features and content most relevant to them, keeping them engaged within our ecosystem. - Embed education along the way
Teaching and reinforcing the value of our different tools and offerings reinforces the ‘why’ behind using our platform and gets them comfortable with taking those first steps. - Reward and Delight our users
We want our users to leave with a positive experience of our platform while getting the value they were searching for.
By keeping these principles at the heart of what we build, we are able to develop a journey towards activation and prioritize key touchpoints to activate our users.
One opportunity we identified was how might give our customers an easy way to continue momentum after entering the platform to access a specific Resilia Academy Resource, and see the deeper value Resilia has to offer. We found that a majority of our users were coming in through social media campaigns leading to Academy content pages and templates. These interactions were fairly transactional with a user entering, downloading the content, and leaving the platform. Our solution was to offer additional pathways to different aspects of the platform, relevant to the content they are engaging with.
By keeping the ‘Next Steps’ in context to the themes of the content, we are able to educate and delight users with the additional value Resilia has to offer, and give them clear actions to take towards a high-value action within the platform.
Next, we identified an opportunity to educate and guide our users on our self-serve platform tools, the value each might offer to a user’s organization, and rewarding a user’s progress along the way.
We accomplished this by pairing a guide that immediately lays out the value of the tool along with actionable steps to begin, with tips that reinforce these steps as the user engages with the tool itself. Once a user finishes these steps, we celebrate their accomplishments, to ensure they have a positive experience on our platform.
As we iterate on our Activation strategy, we plan to observe and adapt throughout. We not only want to ensure our efforts are leading users toward Activation as we’ve defined it, but also want to confirm the value users are experiencing in and toward that ‘activation’ stage effectively sets things in motion to receive value again through Resilia.
Stay tuned on how we continue to evolve our Activation strategy in 2022!
