Gather & Lead
A dashboard that helps nonprofit organizers stay focused, not frazzled.
Gather & Lead is a unified event-planning dashboard for small nonprofits. It streamlines workflows, alleviates stress, and centers focus on purpose, not tool overload.
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As the UX Designer, I led the full design process; from vision and research to wireframes, prototype, and usability testing. This included crafting clear user flows, setting visual direction, and building a scalable component system to ensure clarity and consistency.
Role
UX Designer
Industry
Non-Profit
Duration
8 Weeks, ~80 hours
Tools
Figma, Figjam, Adobe Illustrator, Lyssna
Challenge
Small nonprofits juggle email, spreadsheets, and messaging apps, leading to confusion, missed details, and planning chaos. The task: uncover real pain points and design a simple, focused planning experience.
Hypothesis
If small nonprofits had a simple, centralized dashboard that combined communication, volunteer management, and event logistics, they could:
Reduce context-switching and save time
Improve collaboration with clear, shared workflows
Focus more on community impact instead of administration
Framework
I grounded this project in the design thinking process, moving through five key stages: empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test. This approach ensured that each decision was rooted in user insights and iteratively refined through feedback.
My research goal was to understand the challenges small non-profits face when planning donor events and identify the core features an event management tool should provide. To guide this, I focused on five objectives: why non-profits host events, how they organize them, whether cost is a barrier, what event types are common, and who decides which tools to use.
Discovery
Competitive audit
I analyzed five competitors and found a crowded market with overlapping features. The right tool depends on an organization’s priorities, event complexity, and budget. Most tools (GiveButter, Eventbrite, Facebook) were either overly complex or lacked customization and communication control
Insights
Budgets are tight and that affects everything
If it’s not free or donated, it’s probably off the table.
Why? Money is a huge constraint. Even affordable tools are out of reach if they don’t immediately
show value. Any solution has to work within these financial realities.
Available event planning tools are often overkill
We don’t need all the bells and whistles. We just need something that works.
Why? Big platforms often feel like too much for smaller, simpler events. Organizers want something that’s quick to use, easy to understand, and actually feels built for them.
User interviews
I interviewed 6 nonprofit directors, volunteer coordinators, school organizers, and community leaders to learn why they plan events, what works, what doesn’t, and what tools they wish they had. I asked questions like:
Who is the primary user who decides or plans the events?
How many events do they plan per year?
Is the event focused on fundraising or donor appreciation?
Is there a budget for paying for event management services?
Insights
Most rely on a patchwork of free apps
Because budgets are so tight, most rely on whatever free apps they can patch together.
Why? Even inexpensive tools are hard to justify if the payoff isn’t immediate
show value. Any solution has to work within these financial pressures.
Events aren’t just about fundraising
Our events aren’t just to raise money-they’re to bring our community together.
Why: Many organizers prioritize community engagement and donor appreciation just as highly, if
not more, than fundraising goals (Fundraising matters, but it's just one part of the picture.)
Volunteers are essential, but hard to coordinate
Getting volunteers is one thing-keeping track of them is another.
Why?: Everyone depends on volunteers, but the tools to manage them are usually spreadsheets
or messy text threads. People want something easier and clearer to stay on top of who’s doing
what.
Strategy
As organizers shared their experiences, a clear pattern emerged — one of passion, resourcefulness, and persistent obstacles. Two major challenges stood out: keeping information organized across scattered tools, and communicating easily with different groups. The following points of view reflect these needs and highlight key opportunities for impact:
Nonprofit and community organizers need a way to keep event and volunteer information in one place so their teams can stay aligned without juggling multiple tools.
They also need a simple way to communicate with their different audiences (volunteers, guests, and donors) without repeating tasks or switching platforms.
So, how might we bring together planning, tracking, and communication in one space?
Based on research findings, I proposed areas of focus for our approach when designing this new platform.
User goals: intuitive tools to streamline workflows and clarify roles.
Business goals: affordable, scalable, easy to adopt.
Tech goals: secure, simple, and integrative.
Design Goal 1: Simplify communication with volunteer groups by enabling both assigning volunteers and requesting help.
Design Goal 2: Streamline workflows by centralizing information to one hub style dashboard.
I then mapped user and task flows, and prioritized features that solved the most immediate pain points: volunteer coordination, streamlined communication, and centralized event info. Rather than overwhelm users with settings and features, I wanted to prioritized clarity and simplicity. So, I narrowed focus to two critical flows based on user urgency and feasibility:
Creating a New Event
Adding Volunteers to an Existing Event
These flows addressed the most pressing pain points: scattered planning tools, confusing communication, and time-consuming coordination.
Exploration
Create New Event
Iterations
Final Deliverables
Core Features developed were:
Organizer Dashboard: one central place for tasks, files, communication.
Create a new event: a simplified, mobile-friendly interface for creating events that have to-do and volunteer requests included in the process.
Each screen was designed to reduce clutter, emphasize clarity, and feel approachable.
Reflection
From sketch to prototype, every decision centered on reducing overwhelm. The project taught me:
Small UX changes → big impact. Clearer labels and flows dramatically improved usability.
Constraints matter. Designing with limited resources in mind kept the solution practical.
Confidence in simplicity. Cutting complexity and choosing “enough” over “everything” resulted in a better product.
This project is still in progress, with a hope of one day launching to help solve real wold non-profit problems.
