I worked with the Taproot Foundation with the shared goal of making pro bono service more readily available, trusted, and widely used by the nonprofit community. As the Product Manager for Taproot+, I collaborated with a developer, design shop, and community manager to test assumptions and create an open marketplace for pro bono projects. Here's an outline of how we approached this project, and what made it successful.
Embedded Files
Outcomes, not outputs
Outcomes, not outputs
Taproot’s existing programs provided a solid set of ground rules for good pro bono service, but since each were run meticulously by experienced staff, it was hard to grow. To achieve that scale, Taproot had originally envisioned a set of features, our outputs, that would result in a functional marketplace. We took a step back, and refocused on a set of goals, or outcomes, that should result, like matching 10 nonprofits with a volunteer each week.
Hypothesis and assumptions
Hypothesis and assumptions
Our hypothesis, and the motivator for this project in the first place, was that nonprofits and volunteers would be willing to connect themselves. Numerous user interviews helped us verify some of the assumptions we had about nonprofits and volunteers. Doing this, we made one of our biggest discoveries: we found that volunteers were much more likely to engage a nonprofit to start a project than vice versa. In other words, the marketplace needed to enable the volunteers to do the shopping, while nonprofit effort needed to be minimized.
Minimum viable product
Minimum viable product
As soon as it was possible, we launched an end-to-end service that introduced volunteers to pro bono project options and allowed them to indicate if they’d like to inquire about one. This consisted of a set of static web pages and an admin email account which we managed manually to send notifications, instructions, and reminders.
Learn and automate
Learn and automate
As we manually responded to user needs, we learned which were most common and automated them, ensuring that nothing we built wasn’t measurably adding value. We implemented a simple scheduling tool, so we weren't constantly coordinating interviews, and added an automatic check-in system that reminded users to let us know if projects needed our help.
The results
The results
In the 2.5 years I managed this product, it grew to 30,000 users, resulting in $7.5 million in pro bono service delivered.
In the 2.5 years I managed this product, it grew to 30,000 users, resulting in $7.5 million in pro bono service delivered.
To learn more, check out the Taproot+ case study in the Harvard Business Review
To learn more, check out the Taproot+ case study in the Harvard Business Review
Page updated
Google Sites
Report abuse