Connect community and giving in one app

UMMA Foundation runs relief, agriculture, and community programs across 15+ countries. The UMMA app is how donors and volunteers stay connected: events, announcements, campaigns, and conversations in one place.

Umma Relief, Umma Farm, and community channels had sounded like three brands in notifications and landing pages. While advising, we aligned verbal branding and built reusable modules: donation blocks, story cards, and impact stats shared across properties. One voice from the field to the phone.

Masjids and community centers can run the same content on a TV dashboard: prayer times, announcements, local businesses, and feeds members see in the app.

• UMMA community TV dashboard for masjid and community center displays: TV dashboard for community centers

How members stay connected

Members find communities near them, RSVP to events, and give from the same thread they use for announcements. Leaders see engagement in one admin view instead of chasing updates across channels.

• UMMA app discover screen listing nearby communities and organizations: Find communities
• UMMA app events screen with upcoming community gatherings and RSVP options: Events
• UMMA app conversations view with community channels and direct messages: Conversations
• UMMA app campaign screen showing fundraising progress and donation options: Campaigns and giving
• UMMA app admin dashboard showing community engagement and campaign metrics: Community dashboard

Fix where donors dropped off

We mapped the mobile donation path screen by screen. Most abandonment happened before amount selection: too many program choices with equal weight, unclear impact copy, and trust signals buried below the fold.

We rewrote the first screen around one program per campaign, surfaced where the meal or kit went, and moved payment trust marks up. Conversion moved 20% once donors could answer "what happens next" in one glance.

Ship on cadence when campaigns will not wait

Work had been hero-driven: urgent fixes, unclear requirements, uneven QA. We introduced lightweight sprint planning, definition-of-done for store releases, and a single backlog ranked by donor impact and engineering risk.

The team released core features to app stores with full QA on the paths donors used most. Predictability mattered because Ramadan and emergency campaigns do not wait for process debates.

Coach the team on vibe coding

Speed only helps if donor paths stay stable. While advising, I coached the engineering team on vibe coding: when to use AI-assisted development, how to review agent output before merge, and which flows needed human judgment first (payments, trust copy, store releases).

We paired live sessions with small shipped slices so the team learned by doing, not by slide deck. The goal was a team that could adopt AI development without breaking the donation funnel. Same pattern I write about in The future of developers when AI writes the first draft.

Grow average gift and repeat donors

After conversion stabilized, we tested suggested amounts tied to tangible outcomes: meals, medical kits, farm supplies. Average donation size grew 50%.

We paired the UI change with post-donation follow-up that showed delivery proof, which kept repeat donors coming back with a light first tap. Field impact and app engagement reinforced each other.