Background

Access to a nearby health clinic is a huge barrier to receiving healthcare, and HAC is working to change that. With over 1,153 outreach clinics in Uganda, Health Access Connect (HAC) has served over 38,516 patients. HAC, as such, connects remote Ugandan communities to healthcare. These healthcare clinics provide a myriad of services, such as antiretroviral treatment, HIV testing, vaccinations, malaria treatment, and child checkups. To do this, healthcare workers travel to these remote areas, either through public transportation or a motorcycle or boat taxi financed through HAC, and community leaders coordinate collecting money from patients to finance their transportation. In the past, this course has supported HAC in reimagining their website design and structure, brainstorming ideas for a documentary, and experimenting with AI outreach. This year, our goals will be to connect the physically and emotionally distant stakeholders (i.e. prospective and current donors) to the HAC users (i.e. healthcare workers and community members in Uganda) in a just and ethical way, with the ultimate goal of increasing fundraising. We will be focusing on three projects this year: 1) creating an end of year fundraising campaign, 2) storyboarding the journey of community members in Uganda, and 3) creating a pitch to build capacity through hiring a development manager.

Idea 1: End of Year Fundraiser

The first idea discussed with Kevin was an end of year fundraiser. Currently, HAC receives funding from two main channels: grants and donations. While grants are great, we learned they usually include a lot of limitations in where and how the organization can spend the money. Because of this, HAC wants us to focus on an initiative to increase their individual donor funding (and thus increase their access to unrestricted funding). 

Knowing these two populations we aim to connect with will help inform the ideas we brainstorm. Additionally, we will incorporate the CAT framework and carefully consider UX regarding engagement with our “donation pitches”. A couple of our current project ideas include designing informative ads (to run on Instagram) and launching a fundraising campaign (potentially involving an activity with hopes of “viralizing” on social media).      

Idea 2: Storyboarding User Journey

The next idea we discussed was storyboarding the user journey to better amplify the impact of HAC. This idea is not new to the nonprofit space as countless other organizations have employed this technique to facilitate greater donations, outreach, and even impact. We hope to use other organizations’ storyboards as inspiration to provide Kevin with an impactful end product.

The end product will aim to ethically tell the story of a person who has been impacted by HAC. The product must also effectively connect donors abroad to people in Uganda. People, globally, must truly understand the plight of individuals in this region and how HAC will use donor money to help them. HAC has tried its hand at storyboarding in the past through a documentary. Unfortunately, this didn’t pan out as expected; hence, the necessity to pivot to another idea. A few ideas have been proposed thus far such as a Youtube video, short story, infocomic, and carousel images on Instagram. However, before deciding on the medium we will be going through a thorough discussion process that reveals the idea with the most potential impact.

Idea 3: Pitching for Building Capacity

The third idea from Kevin is pitching for building capacity and hiring more people to help increase positive influence. Specifically, Kevin wanted to hire a development manager, which is essentially the head of fundraising. The challenge Kevin faces is that it is difficult to express to donors the necessity of this position. 

Our design thinking process will start with collecting ideas from Kevin, as he mentioned he had a few existing ideas but needed help on refinding and narrowing them down. We will clarify the ideal amount to fundraise and, more importantly, the characteristics Kevin would like to see from the role. Similar to the first idea on end-of-year fundraising, we also need to elaborate a lot of data storytelling on the mission of the organization and the help the organization would get from this role. However, the storytelling for hiring will be much more concise compared to the end-of-year campaign because fewer total funds are needed. We will have to craft a story well enough that we can attract potential talents or referrals from people in the community for an ideal candidate. The ideal outcome from the fundraising campaign is that we can both raise enough money from the position and get a plethora of applications for the position so that Kevin can start the hiring process as soon as we raise the money.

Themes

Through team brainstorming, we created the theme “Health is the Greatest Gift,” which guides the entire fundraising theme for HAC this holiday season. We wanted to create a theme that connected physically distant stakeholders – donors in the United States and patients in Uganda. We also wanted the theme to be positive, welcoming, and supportive. As such, we came up with the overall concept of gratitude, which is directly related to Thanksgiving and the holiday season. And, our team thinks that is is always great to be gratuitous. As such, we wanted to focus on giving gifts, which is related to the holiday season. Lastly, we wanted to specifically promote health, as HAC works to promote Health in Uganda. As such, we created “Health is the Greatest Gift.” A theme that ties into the holiday season and supports gratitude. 

Thus far, Mercy and Kevin have used this theme on the website and posted a graphic on their Instagram. It was quite empowering for our team to see these graphics in a real application.

Graphics + Media Outreach

Health is the Greatest Gift Graphics

ΩIn order to promote the Health is the Greatest Gift theme in a cohesive and aesthetic way, we created several graphics to promote this theme. 

Sunday Stories

Sunday Stories will be sent out on social media and weekly newsletters, allowing donors and followers to connect with patients. 

Thank You Postcards

In order for donors to feel connected to the HAC community, we created a Thank You postcard to be sent out to all donors. This simple and inexpensive appreciation gift allows the donor to feel connected to HAC and have a physical representation of that. 

Why Did Some Ideas Fail?

One thing we realized as a team is that failure is an integral part of the design process. We would not have been able to effectively integrate transmedia knowledge into our partner’s project without going through many iterations and ideas. Our team saw failure in complete ideas and also prototype iterations.

The first idea wasn’t necessarily a failure but rather a goal the team chose not to complete this semester: stressing the importance of a development manager. This idea from Kevin called for building capacity and hiring more people to help increase positive influence. Specifically, Kevin wanted to hire a development manager, which is essentially the head of fundraising. The challenge Kevin faces is that it is difficult to express to donors the necessity of this position. The outcome would have been us designing the entire process to fundraise for a development manager and convey to the audience the importance of this position. However, in a meeting halfway through the semester, we collectively decided our limited time was best spent on other projects and ideas. However, this is a great idea that could perhaps be explored in more depth next semester.

The next failure involved our prototyping iterations of graphics in the broader fundraising campaign. Design is an ever-changing process and our team designer (Aliza) came up with numerous designs (many of them are showcased above) but not all of them were 100% approved by Kevin. For instance, one of the iterations had text in a handwriting font which Kevin wasn’t a fan of. However, Aliza and the team understood his logic; next time, we were able to show him our next iteration which was swiftly approved. This critiquing process was a collection of small failures which weren’t significant in the grand scheme of things. However, it is worth mentioning to better understand our design process.

Our final failure to note is the one-hour virtual webinar. This idea spawned from other similar events done by other organizations and a more streamlined version done by HAC through a Cornell platform. The purpose was to connect with donors on a deeper level to prompt larger, more frequent donations. The actual details took a lot of time to fledge out and went through numerous iterations. Furthermore, a theme was even developed which involved making it a “breakfast” event. However, logistically this project is hard to carry out and Kevin didn’t see much of an impact. After a long conversation, the team and Kevin decided this idea should be paused for now. So, we then diverted our attention to our more successful ideas. Overall, this idea was a failure but the team is grateful it happened. We were able to learn a lot more about our audience which helped us iterate better in other areas.

Final Words

After twelve weeks of working in conjunction with Health Access Connect, specifically Mercy and Kevin, we have created several concrete deliverables, and had fun and learned a lot by doing so. First, through these user journey maps and user scenario applications, we gained a better understanding of the main stakeholders of HAC to understand their goals, motivations, and pain points. We create the theme, “Health is the greatest gift,” several graphics, including fundraising graphics for Giving Tuesday and Sunday Stories, and email templates. Lastly, we created a more abstract idea of a virtual breakfast that can be expanded on during future semesters. We feel so lucky to have worked with HAC and learn from pioneers in the international healthcare nonprofit space