Reimagining political fundraising with Call Time Mobile
How I stepped in mid-project to complete a mobile app and web redesign, driving a 30% increase in user engagement
B2B | Responsive Web | Mobile 0 to 1 | 10 months
My role
I joined the project after user interviews and early design explorations. I led the web redesign from ideation to shipping and the final designs for the mobile app.
I collaborated closely with one PM, one mobile engineer, and five engineers. This project lasted 10 months until I left the company.
What’s NGP VAN (now Bonterra)?
NGP VAN helps political campaigns and nonprofits organize their efforts. It supports thousands of Democratic and progressive campaigns in the U.S, and over 80 million voters.
What’s call time?
Call time drives 70% of campaign funding. Candidates make calls asking for support and money to fund their campaigns.
Calling is a numbers game—the more calls made, the higher the chances of receiving more contributions.
What’s the problem?
Campaign teams are overwhelmed and busy.
They need to make more calls quickly to connect with more supporters.
The 2020 pandemic compelled political campaigns to reevaluate their in-person format and our team to reexamine the existing Call Time solution and its effectiveness.
Final designs
Research
8 interviews emphasized the product’s overall usability issues
The team tested a Google Sheets integration solution to solve for pain points within data entry.
They learned that the data entry aspect is tedious but campaigns were most anxious about:
Identifying the supporters that are most likely to contribute
Creating effective lists under tight deadlines
Candidates having the right information during calls
“What can we talk to this person about that will make them answer the phone”
“The more people we talk to, the better our chances of getting that ask [contribution]”
An overhaul was needed
We recognized the need for a complete overhaul of the product.
Users created their own workarounds when using the existing product but were forced to manage their workflow elsewhere, such as Excel spreadsheets.
A Google Sheets integration would simply be a bandaid.
Crafting personas to align on needs and pain points
We focused to solve for the newer, green campaign teams with younger candidates who are open to trying new call time techniques and to being guided through the process.
Identifying journey-level pain points
Pain point levels were highest during the prep stage for managers and the calling stage for candidates.
What users want
Campaign managers
Help identify the right people to call to build effective call lists.
Candidates
Provide the flexibility to make calls in shorter sessions at their own convenience.
Business goal
Increase feature adoption
A mobile app would encourage campaigns to explore the full Call Time solution.
Success metrics
Campaign metrics
Increase in call pickup rate
Increase in daily call volume & frequency
Increase in contributions made
Customer metrics
Time spent on call list management
Decrease in printed call sheets
Decrease in task error rate
Test and validate
Time spent on call list management
We were constrained from addressing Create List, which would make the greatest impact
I prioritized designs that increased efficiency such as:
Statuses to clearly label supporters that are ready for calling, connected, and not connected
Flexible sorting by both a defined criteria and drag-and-drop functionality
Bulk actions to modify status or re-sort a group quickly
Tradeoffs made
I explored a preview drawer and a more extensive pagination for managers to more seamlessly navigate.
We settled for a standard select on the detail page to search contacts. Sessions showed users constantly navigate back and forth between the call list and detail pages in short intervals.
With this insight, we aimed to prioritize these iterations for the next release.
Increase in call pickup rate · Increase in daily call volume and frequency
New mobile app to make calls anywhere
Call Time Mobile empowers campaign teams to make a higher volume of calls with greater efficiency and speed. They can effortlessly access call lists, CRM data, and track call results from anywhere, anytime.
Click-to-dial integration for easy virtual calls
Teams can join calls together, eliminating the need for time-consuming workarounds such as burner phones, speakerphones, or three-way calls.
I developed an in-app collaboration design that provides real-time visibility on who is engaged in an active call.
Increase in contributions made
I pushed to keep templates for faster follow-ups.
One of the biggest pain points is chasing down supporters who made verbal agreements to contribute.
Advocating for this work resulted in a 10% decrease in call lists created specifically for contribution follow-ups.
Build, measure, and learn
Results
We made amazing impact in the first year of release:
30% increase in user engagement
Campaigns made 10-20 more calls per day
Call sessions increased from 1 to 3 a day
Print Call Sheet feature usage dropped by 75% compared to the previous year
The energy level was noticeably higher in call sessions as candidates felt that calls were more efficient with the mobile app and manageable in shorter blocks.
Where we missed the mark
❌ Increase in call pickup rate
We discussed research efforts to better identify supporters that provide call timeframes.
❌ Decrease in time spent making call lists
Managers are still spending too much time identifying the supporters. We hoped to explore AI solutions for list generation.
Reflections
Call time made a huge impact on a challenging industry practice and I feel honored to be part of this project early in my design career.
Call Time Mobile won in Best Phones-Fundraising category in the 2022 Reed Awards.
Though Call Time Mobile was meant for candidates without managers, campaigns were more comfortable to use the app as a CRM initially.
Change is gradual. While we witnessed campaign teams embracing this digital shift, many campaigns preferred the traditional structure with candidates focused on calls and managers doing the rest.
The biggest challenge ahead was guiding campaigns through the digital transition.