Artists & Musicians
COVID-19 Relief Fund

Visual design, UX design & strategy
Duration
March 2020
Strategy & Design — 2 weeks 
Build — 1 week
Team
Brandon Law
Bohdana Tyshchenko
Andrew Batten
Thank you to design.local for pairing us up for this project!
Project overview
I helped create a website for a Canadian organization to provide emergency funding to low-income artists and musicians. 
Check out the real site here!
My contributions
Website & content strategy 
UX design & visual design (Figma)
Building the website (Cargo, HTML & CSS)
About the problem space
How COVID-19 is impacting artists and musicians
As a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, thousands of live performances, exhibitions and events got cancelled overnight for the foreseeable future. This all translates into lost income for low-income artists, musicians, and cultural producers who rely on those events to make a living. 

Canadian Artist Musician Relief Fund (CAMRF) is a group based in Montreal who are putting together an effort to help deliver emergency support payments to low-income artists and musicians in the Montreal and Toronto area. 

59%

of applicants who apply to receive funding from CAMRF have an annual income of under

$15,000

before the pandemic.

Project Goal
Convert from visitors to donors
As a newly founded organization, CAMRF was in need of an official platform for the newly attracted donors to learn about their mission and details about the fund. The goal is to increase the amount of site visitors that become donors by the time they scroll to the end of the page.

The website should be live within 3 weeks.
Primary user persona
Identifying potential high value donors
From StatsCanada: People between the age of 17-34 were on average less likely to donate. Average amounts of donation increase with age. The founders of CAMRF have already decided to target high value donors who have a passion for art and music for this fund. Here are some profiles of potential donors:

Potential high value donors are all very likely to share this one common characteristic: 
They are not part of the low-income artist and musician community. Therefore, they may not be able to empathize easily with the artist and musician community in need.

Since the community of low-income artists and musicians are likely all in the same boat financially, the donors (ones who are more financially stable during the pandemic) are likely to be from outside that community.
The 4 step happy path
Understanding a potential donor's thought process
It's important that the website should flow to capture the mental model of someone making a decision to donate. So we worked on identifying the thought process of a potential donor, in order to match the type of content that will compel them to donate.

Step 1: Learn what the fund is
The potential donor will want to see a summary of what the fund is and who they will be donating to.
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Step 2: Build empathy with a compelling story 
From my personal experience engaging in the local music scene, there is a great sense of community. Since the primary donors are not within this community, we need to attract them with a compelling story. This way, donors will find themselves empathizing with the ups and downs of being an artist and musician affected by the pandemic.

Step 3: Be transparent about the fund.
Show how the money is distributed! Once we’ve got the donor's attention and they feel like this is a cause that resonates with them, they will want to dig more to learn more about how the fund works. They will want to find out answers to questions like: how is the money distributed? Who are qualifying recipients? And how much is distributed per recipient? 

Step 4: Click on the donate button!
If how the fund works seems reasonable to them, they will now be motivated to donate! 
Design
Scoping down to a minimum viable product (MVP)

Working on a tight timeline, the team chose features that have emphasis on helping to build empathy with the donor and communicate transparency about the fund.

Artists and musicians needed the donations as soon as possible meant the website should be live as soon as possible. The team worked on a tight timeline to decide which features were most vital for the first iteration of the website. This was a key part of project planning in order to achieve the project goal.

Following the happy path steps identified, here were the features to help build empathy: 
  • Have artists, musicians and donors' quotes
  • Show quantitative data about fund recipients 
Here were the features to communicate transparency about the fund: 
  • Explain how & what the fund is
  • Frequently asked questions (FAQ) section
  • Explain how money is being distributed
What features did not make the cut for MVP? 
  • Link to artist's and musician's work
  • Feature shops for purchasing merch
  • Service request (make a poster, request a song or remote concert)
I'd love to see the website grow to include these features. They are designed to foster a sense of community and tackle the donor's potential concern of "why donate here when I could be donating to the healthcare system, which has more direct impact on the pandemic?"
What did I learn?
It was a great experience working on this project with 4 designers. Never having worked with so many designers at once, I was worried initially that it would be more difficult to come to agreement on one final solution if we all had different opinions. As it turns out, I was overthinking it! Reflecting back, what really helped was giving and receiving constructive feedback on what didn't best fit the project. Whenever I introduced a new idea, I made sure to follow up with a "what do you think?" to open the floor up to designers who may be less vocal. Having worked completely remote on this project, planning what work needs to be done while on call vs when to assign a task to work offline was critical to maximizing efficiency.

It was super rewarding to be involved with this project for a community that I care about. The Canadian local music and art scene has contributed a ton to my life with their talent, now I can finally use my skills to give back too!
© 2020 Annie Cui
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