Avid
From data to action in fundraising with Avid
My role:
Design lead
Year:
2025
Avid AI is an early-stage SaaS platform built for nonprofit fundraisers. While it offered robust analytics, fundraisers using Avid were generally overwhelmed. The platform surfaced dense dashboards and data snapshots, but users were often left asking, “So now what?” There was no clear path from insight to action. The process of planning and managing fundraising efforts was fragmented across spreadsheets, CRMs, emails, and meetings, making collaboration difficult and inconsistent. Avid brought me in as Design Lead to define and deliver the MVP of a new Campaign Creation Playbook—a guided experience that would help users translate their donor and engagement data into clear, actionable fundraising strategies.
Task
As Design Lead, I was responsible for guiding the rebrand of the platform (old screenshots shown on the right), and defining the UX direction of the new fundraising feature from the ground up. I led research and strategy, managed a junior product designer, and worked closely with product and engineering to ensure the solution was grounded in real user needs. The goal was to improve adoption by designing a feature that supported how fundraisers initiate and manage campaigns based on the large amount of data.
Action: Clarity through customer insight
I led discovery research by conducting in-depth interviews with fundraisers, analysts, and agency users to understand their mental models, language, and pain points. Customer interviews were an essential starting point for us to understand the real-world experiences, define key flows and information architecture, and put together a customer journey map that supported us during the design process for the campaign builder MVP.
Result: Rebranding the platform for cohesion and clarity
While our user research uncovered opportunities for structural and workflow improvements, the rebrand initiative was intentionally scoped as a visual overhaul of the existing platform based on a brand direction set by marketing. Our responsibility was to translate that into a cohesive, accessible product experience, including a refined color palette, UI elements, and content styling.
As part of this effort, we developed Avid’s first design system, establishing foundational patterns and components that would enable the product and engineering teams to scale more efficiently moving forward.
Result: A new Playbooks section MVP
The final Playbook MVP redefined how Avid guides users from donor data to action. Grounded in real user needs, the experience shifted away from generic “campaign” creation toward planning initiatives tied to real fundraising triggers, like revenue shortfalls or lapsed donor segments. Now customers are able to plan, set up and run their campaigns in a guided way.
Phase 1 focused on adding this whole new section into the existing information architecture. Integrating this feature with the Insights Dashboard and reporting were out of scope.
Result: Onboarding and educating customers
Previously, customers relied heavily on Avid’s team for one-on-one guidance during onboarding, creating a support bottleneck and limiting scalability. To address this, we introduced in-product onboarding features designed to reduce the learning curve, empower users to explore independently, and free up internal teams from ongoing handholding.
