Frontline Aid — Bureaucracy mustn’t stop Fundraising.

"To donate or not donate?" This should never be the question! Instead, ask "Donate? Yes — but to whom?"
The start-up "Frontline Aid" set itself the mission to increase the visibility of small, local, donatable projects. We supported the planning, design and implementation of their online services through intensive service design support.

When donating, we often think of big, popular organizations. Per se, that’s not bad, but this mindset creates a concentration of donations for NGOs (non-governmental organizations) and countless small, local projects fall by the wayside.

Frontline Aid wants to stop this.

The start-up has made it its business to:

• connect institutional establishments and institutional facilities and authorities, NGOs, volunteers and lokal change makers
• provide online access to ressources, donations, supporters and information
• enable and significantly simplify the distribution of donations
• strengthen the trust in small organizations
• simplify bureaucracy
• make processes transparent
• be a matchmaking platform for changemarkers and volunteers

In cooperation with Frontline Aid, we already created both a sustainable strategy and precise visions for the online access to a new platform type for donation distribution.

Organization, Administration and Visibility

According to Frontline Aid’s research, about 99% of donations are given to big, popular organizations. However, only just under two percent of global donations actually reach local projects (source: Charter4Change/Local2Global).

Due to several problems, it is hard for many small, local projects to be recognized or even found by donors. Lack of change maker’s language skills (local project initiators), time or access to technical means of communication are only the tip of the iceberg.

Additionally, countless volunteers, institutions or donors fail due to the high bureaucratic and administrative hurdles and thus initiatives nip in the bud.

Service Design for an Improved Online Access

Frontline Aid wants to provide a digital service which both connects all stakeholders and enables local change makers to realise their projects.
Our service design process is perfect in order to create an efficient, user- and value-oriented service:

• Research: We gained insights about the requirements, needs, motivation, behaviors and challenges of all stakeholders
• Synthesis: We condense our findings in insights and define opportunity areas with our customers
• Ideation: We get more specific with product ideas which will solve the stakeholder’s challenges. "How Might We"-questions and customer journey maps come to the fore.
• Strategy: By defining all internal processes, a governance model, community and design principles, finding and defining the brand as well as planning future growth we created a strategic overview by means of a specific roadmap.
• Design Vision: Including all other steps, the design vision forms the basis of both the sustainable design and concept which respect all stakeholders and their needs.
• Concept, Visual Design and Development: These stages are downstream of our service design process and will be implemented in a second project.

We refined the assumptions of Frontline Aid's previous research and created detailed processes based on our interviews, research and workshops.

Detailed Insights and Advantages

Throughout interviews with stakeholders, an intensive research phase and workshops, we found to how the service can really be an improvement for them:

• Less Effort: Frontline Aid makes bureaucracy easier for change makers, which is the biggest hurdle for most of them. The service supports them during the application process, and due to the direct communication with Frontline Aid employees they do not have to create reporting by themselves.
• Transparent Success: The service gives an overview about all available projects and their respective progress.
• Task meets Volunteer: Via the plattform, change makers can distribute tasks and volunteers can offer their talents and skills
• An inclusive Tool for Everyone: Through various simplifications, such as quizzes, translations and an easy onboarding process, we prevent projects from failing due to educational level or language barriers. We help changemaker to understand and fill out mandatory applications and policies.

An extensive Online Service

Our design team created a detailed vision for Frontline Aid of how their platform and service can look like to successfully create added value for all stakeholders.

The service shall be created to keep the bureaucratic burden for all its users as small as possible.

Frontline Aid creates clarity, transparency and efficiency — and at the same time forms important connections between all parties.

Important but tiring tasks are shared between the respective, competent, responsible person.