Tithely

Tithely Giving

What Tithely is

At it's core, Tithely is a donation tool that supports churches and non-profits in collecting and processing online transactions via ACH transfer, Credit/Debit, Cash, or Check. The product suite has expanded over time to become an all-in-one solution for churches, including things like registration and ticketing, member tracking, and self-service website and app builder tools.

• 40,000+ organizations
• 240,000+ weekly active users
• $20m in ARR ‍

💳 Online Collection: Create a custom donation form for your organization and collect donations online or via text-to-donate.

📣Financial Tools: Track physical forms of payment, set campaign goals, generate tax statements, and more.

💳 Member Apps & Engagement Tools: Collect information, tag data, save reports, and streamline communications through email or sms.

A company of acquisitions: how we successfully merged 7 stand-alone products into 1

What went well

• Teams cared, a lot.
• While it took us longer than most would have liked to find clarity in our goals, along the way we were able to articulate and document gaps in validating and understanding the experience, which became an invaluable tool when working with users to shape the final product.
• We delivered an experience that almost immediately started showing it's value–in-app subscriptions went up 120% in the first quarter after launch.
• Existing customers still in the legacy experience are chomping at the bit to be migrated into the new experience (which we're working on
😌‍). But some find it so valuable, they're willing to pay twice for duplicative functionality until their data can be transformed from one experience to the other.

Where we struggled

• It took way too long to define measurable outcomes–we were vaguely chasing "unlock new revenue streams" or "increase average revenue per user" for the first half of the project.
• Major changes in leadership–VCs, VP of Product, CRO–led to a constant shift in goals and priorities.
• Product and Growth teams were working long hours, having repeat conversations, and sitting in meetings that often felt purposeless before we were able to align on what we were actually trying to accomplish.

Where did I fit in?

When Tithely first acquired the company I was working for, Breeze, I promptly quit. There was no design team, no processes involving design, and no one at the company that appeared excited to give designers a bigger voice. Fast forward three years, and Tithely reached out to see if I wanted to spearhead one of the largest projects they had ever taken on.

Before I re-joined, Tithely was made up of 7 individual products: Giving, Apps, Sites, Pay™, Messaging, Media, and Church Management. Although we had a large customer base and low churn, the cracks were starting to show in the user experience–styles, layouts, nomenclature, and navigation were incompatible across products. This didn't just cause pain for our users, but our internal teams were reaching their limits of the number of unique experiences they could support well.

At a remote company, it can take a long time to get all the key players the context they need. Sometimes, people are left out of important background conversations and the 'why' behind a decision gets lost in the noise. The path to providing a great user experience starts with buy-in from the company, you need everyone to be as excited about the thing you're designing so that they sell it, market it, build it, and support it to the best of their ability. If they don't understand why what you're doing a good idea, it's going to show in all corners of the product and experience. Cross-department communication and storytelling was where I spent a lot of my time; the changes we were making would affect every single person's job at the company and even how we structured out internal teams.

Less than 30% of my time on this project was spent working on "designs" in Figma. I led with user-validated IA flows and frameworks that helped everyone align on data definitions and relationships across our products. I then worked alongside engineering and product leadership, stakeholders, board members, and growth teams to uncover the most critical core tasks that our users were itching to have simplified for them. We transformed our data layers to support these use cases, scaling all up the way to the navigation for a seamless experience that no longer felt like 7 disjointed products, but one cohesive collection of tools.