Great Design – An Essential Feature For Your Nonprofit CRM

In a previous post we shared some reasons why great design is more than just a “nice to have” for you nonprofit software. Great design is an important feature of any nonprofit software and should be considered alongside all the “more practical” features.

Now that we have established that great design matters, let’s talk about a few things to look for when evaluating new software.

Responsive design – one third of all web traffic now comes from mobile devices and that number is growing every year. Up to 47% of all emails are read on a mobile device. Mobile is not only here to stay, it will soon become the only consumption device your donor database. Your nonprofit software should be ready. Responsive design is an approach that provides an optimal page layout regardless of the screen size. Site buttons and features will rearrange themselves depending on the type of device being used. At Kindful, we consider mobile with everything we build because your fundraising efforts are are not confined to your desk. Your team is out and about at events, meeting with donors, and spreading awareness about your cause, and quite frankly, we don’t think it should be any other way. There is no reason your donor database shouldn’t go with them.

Less is more – we have said it before and we will say it again. What good are features if your organization doesn’t use them? It seems that many donor database systems have been so focused on adding new features that they have lost sight of whether those new features are well designed or even useful. Every new button, we feel, takes away from the simplicity of the product. At Kindful, before we add any new feature we ask ourselves, “Does this promote our ease of use?” The value of any new feature MUST ALWAYS outweigh any added complexity.

Which button do I push? – recently we read a rule for writing web copy and we think it applies to design as well. Step 10 feet away from your computer. Now pick which button you need to push on a particular page. If it isn’t obvious your design may be lacking. When we designed Kindful every page was designed with the user’s actions in mind. What are users trying to do on each page and how can we make that action as easy as possible? The result is an interface that has been described by our customers, prospects and partners as “way better than anything else on the market.” But we haven’t stopped here, on April 1 we will be launching our Kindful Cause Pages for team-based fundraising with a donation button that scrolls down with the page on mobile so a donor is never searching for a way to give. Later this year we plan to launch Kindful 2.0, which will be the single largest leap in design that has ever been made in the nonprofit CRM market. We think you’ll like it and we can’t wait to share.

This is a just a short list of design features that we consider when improving Kindful. We think nonprofits will benefit from considering them when selecting software. We will point out additional features in future blog posts but for today, if we can do anything with this one post, I hope we have you thinking about software design and layout. More than just a pretty face, great design is an essential feature for any nonprofit software you may be considering.