UMMA Foundation: donation flow fixes, design system, and delivery cadence that lifted conversion 20% and average gift size 50%.
Project Summary
UMMA Foundation runs relief, agriculture, and community programs across 15+ countries. Donors and volunteers needed clearer paths to give and stay engaged; the internal team needed a repeatable way to ship.
My Role
Product advisor: agile cadence, design system, donation flow optimization, verbal branding alignment, and team coaching through store deployment.
The Problem
Donation flows had friction, requirements shifted mid-sprint, and verbal branding varied across relief, farm, and community programs. The team needed predictable delivery without losing mission clarity.
Start with the donation drop-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.
Build a delivery cadence the team could run
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.
Unify voice and components
Umma Relief, Umma Farm, and Umma Social sounded like three brands in notifications and landing pages. We aligned verbal branding and built a small design system: donation modules, story cards, and impact stats reused across properties. Developers stopped rebuilding the same screens; marketing stopped rewriting tone per channel.
Grow average gift size
After conversion stabilized, we tested suggested amounts tied to tangible outcomes (meals, medical kits) instead of open-ended fields. Average donation size grew 50%. We paired the UI change with post-donation follow-up that showed delivery proof, which kept repeat donors without adding pressure in the first tap.
Outcome
Conversion rose 20%, average donation size grew 50%, and the team established a repeatable release cadence with unified branding across programs.
Closing Insight
The 20% conversion lift came from answering what happens to the gift before we asked for the card number.