Case Study

Demographics Analysis Tool

Integrating external data to empower equitable giving

Product
Fluxx/Candid Integration
Role
Senior Product Designer
Impact
  • $400k+ New opportunity ARR
  • 90+% reduction in implementation time

Overview

Fluxx is an industry-leading cloud platform for grants management, used by dozens of the world’s most well-known foundations and charitable nonprofits. As lead product designer, I designed a component to help funders analyze the demographic makeup of grantee organizations, pulling valuable data from external sources directly into the platform with no configuration required.

Problems

  • Best-in-class nonprofit demographic data is locked away in a gated external platform
  • Intake of external data to the Fluxx platform is manual and time consuming
  • Several large-scale clients at risk of churn due to fragmented workflows

Goals

  • Integrate third-party data into Fluxx workflows, with an external source of truth (Candid.org)
  • Provide actionable insights for users of all skill levels
  • Maintain accessibility standards (WCAG 2.2 AA)

Process

One of the biggest, and most potentially fraught decisions in building out our data visualizations was picking appropriate colors for the interactive data visualization. After lots of competitive research in the space, I came to the conclusion that the vast majority of data visualizations on the web do not take color seriously. Accessibility, legibility, and actionability are often thrown out the window for harmonious or “eye-catching” palettes, even in industry-leading products.

At minimum, the visualization required 10 colors that were:

  • WCAG 2.2 AA-compliant against white
  • Semantically neutral (i.e. not invoking pre-conceived notions like "green = good", "red = bad")
  • Brand-aligned
  • Differentiable at a distance
  • Differentiable to users with various color-blindness conditions
Color palette filtered for various color-blindness conditions
Final visualization color palette filtered for various color-blindness conditions

Solution

The shipped solution delivered approachable visualizations in context with the other information Fluxx users need to make granting decisions. Underlying data is available in one click, and downloadable in CSV or PDF formats. This new component is currently used by hundreds of nonprofits on a daily basis. Read more about the feature on Fluxx's blog →.

The solution:

  • Saved dozens of hours per client configuring custom integrations (>90% reduction in time to implement similar functionality)
  • Created $400k of attributable opportunity pipeline in the first 6 months
Demographic data component within a Fluxx dashboard

Further Considerations

While the delivered component is very useful for reviewing grantee organizations one-by-one, the real power in this kind of data comes from aggregation and automation. Executives want to know not just the composition of a single nonprofit, but how the demographics of their entire giving portfolio stack up. Fluxx plans to build out more robust reporting infrastructure to support these use cases in the future.