At Meetup, we wanted to create a new way to let members give money to their organizers toward expenses and platform fees.
Follow along to see what we learned from user testing, iterations, and how we got this (slightly more complicated than it should have been) process to work...
Hypothesis:
If we make it easy for members to contribute money to their organizer, it will make both the members and the organizers happy.
As we couldn't legally say "donation," we went with "Contributions" as the name for this new feature. We launched into beta for a month, showing this to a small percentage of organizers after usability testing with a couple in our office.
Once the organizer turned on this feature, they were then prompted to contact their members and share the news.
Test 1:
Contributions started rolling in! (Okay, that’s a lie. There were shockingly few organizers who took any action at all.) But for those who did, and who had members respond, they saw this.
After nearly calling the test a fail, we made a bold move that was backed by a few organizers in our usability conversations.
Test 2:
We turned it ON by default for all Meetups not currently accepting funds in any other way, automatically showing the “Chip in” button on their Meetup pages and switching the organizer action to turn off the Contributions feature.
Additionally, we stripped it all down and removed the “Contributions” name for the feature (one of the most important lessons in my career) so the steps were this simple.
Members see “Chip in” and they do it or don’t.
The setting later dropped the “Contributions” language too, leaving it as an on/off toggle for “Show the ‘Chip in’ button” for organizers.
In the end, the vast majority of organizers and members were delighted by the notion of “chipping in” and we learned to simplify.
