Year
2022–2023
Contribution
User reserach
UX & UI
Design System
Wireframing
Prototyping
Illustration
Animation
What did we accomplish?
Artizen connects grantmakers, donors, and creators, enabling them to crowdfund grants for art, science, and public goods with transparency. By eliminating bureaucracy and empowering communities, Artizen uses a participatory grant model that benefits creators, grantmakers, and donors alike. The platform combines crowdfunding, community curation, direct ownership and rewards to facilitate direct support for impactful grants, aiming to build a transparent fund for human creativity.
Tested
4
Different iterations of the platform
Raised
$2M+
For public goods and art projects
Connected
8,212
Members
What did the process look like?
We set out to create a funding platform for public goods with a clear understanding of what wasn't working in the traditional grantmaking world. Our goal was to build a system free from the bureaucracy and inefficiencies that plague many funding processes.
I began by defining the basic flywheel of the product: identifying the mechanisms that would drive donations, understanding the different user groups, their motivations, and how we could use these to turn our somewhat utopian vision of a grant system into a reality.
the Sponsor
the Grantmaker
the Donor
the Creator
→
→
→
→
wants to donate money
community champions who want to fundraise
interested in supporting projects
looking for funding
Throughout the project it was often unclear what the path to our goal will be, the project was in its infancy and open to experimentation with different formats. It was crucial to accept this uncertainty and not be overly attached to previous work. Learning through various iterations was as much a part of the process for me, as launching the platform itself.
Thanks to it’s previous version, Artizen already had a very lively community on Discord. Since our platform was very much powered by human connections and the illusive concept of philantropy. Early user input, brainstorming, guerilla testing, validating our ideas – we stayed close to our community. In a somewhat experimental spirit, we were building the platform in public as well – all of our team communications were on the same channel as as our community – open to read for everyone.
What product iterations did we go through?
For the first iteration, we tested a simple idea, where each season would collect donations over the course of a month, with the top donor and one winner drawn at random would win the monthly Featured Artwork. Each receipt per single donation would also be a collectible, featured in each donor's profile – the idea of collectibility started brewing.
Takeaway
We moved on from this iteration quite fast – there was not enough incentive to donate and the site didn't feel alive enough to stay engaged. The collectible aspect resonated with the community.
We combined two ideas here: give the community a larger selection of projects to support and keep working on the collection aspect. Projects selected by the community would have one day to fundraise, with donors racing for the top spot to earn the collectible, we lovingly named Artifact We kept working on public user profiles, where they could show off their collections.
Takeaway
This iteration was well received by donors, but creators felt like having only a day to collect donations. Even with a large following, it was difficult to rally fans and donors to donate on one specific day – too easy to miss.
With learnings of two previous cycles, I worked on combining the mechanisms that resonated the most with both Donors, Creators and Sponsors. A monthly cycle with multiple projects fundraising at the same time, where donors voted by minting the Artifacts. Simultanously creators were competing for the top spot and the Artizen Prize, funded by Sponsors.
Takeaway
This finally put the flywheel in motion – the different levels of competition made creators stay engaged and the donations rise fast
What else did we build?
After implementing dark mode accessibility, we observed a direct increase in session length during off-peak hours.
Each creator had a dedicated page for their project, where they could track their funding progress and showcase their ideas, motivations and team behind their work.
As a lot of the donation were micropayments, we experimented with utilizing crypto payments. Knowing a lot of our audience didn't have experience with wallets, we created a guided flow, putting a lot of thought into the language.
Users could build their public profiles that included a nice gallery of their collectibles.
Together with the public collections, a leaderboard tracking the most active or highest donors, tied together the community aspect.
While working on the product was my main focus, I also art directed and designed the identity, and did almost 30 illustrations big and small, most of them animated in a lightweight vector-based Lottie format.
Year
2022–2023
Contribution
User reserach
UX & UI
Design System
Wireframing
Prototyping
Illustration
Animation
What did we accomplish?
Artizen connects grantmakers, donors, and creators, enabling them to crowdfund grants for art, science, and public goods with transparency. By eliminating bureaucracy and empowering communities, Artizen uses a participatory grant model that benefits creators, grantmakers, and donors alike. The platform combines crowdfunding, community curation, direct ownership and rewards to facilitate direct support for impactful grants, aiming to build a transparent fund for human creativity.
Tested
Raised
Connected
4
$2M+
8,212
Different iterations of the platform
For public goods and art projects
Members
What did the process look like?
We set out to create a funding platform for public goods with a clear understanding of what wasn't working in the traditional grantmaking world. Our goal was to build a system free from the bureaucracy and inefficiencies that plague many funding processes.
I began by defining the basic flywheel of the product: identifying the mechanisms that would drive donations, understanding the different user groups, their motivations, and how we could use these to turn our somewhat utopian vision of a grant system into a reality.
the Sponsor
the Grantmaker
the Donor
the Creator
→
→
→
→
wants to donate money
community champions who want to fundraise
interested in supporting projects
looking for funding
Throughout the project it was often unclear what the path to our goal will be, the project was in its infancy and open to experimentation with different formats. It was crucial to accept this uncertainty and not be overly attached to previous work. Learning through various iterations was as much a part of the process for me, as launching the platform itself.
Thanks to it’s previous version, Artizen already had a very lively community on Discord. Since our platform was very much powered by human connections and the illusive concept of philantropy. Early user input, brainstorming, guerilla testing, validating our ideas – we stayed close to our community. In a somewhat experimental spirit, we were building the platform in public as well – all of our team communications were on the same channel as as our community – open to read for everyone.
What product iterations did we go through?
For the first iteration, we tested a simple idea, where each season would collect donations over the course of a month, with the top donor and one winner drawn at random would win the monthly Featured Artwork. Each receipt per single donation would also be a collectible, featured in each donor's profile – the idea of collectibility started brewing.
Takeaway
We moved on from this iteration quite fast – there was not enough incentive to donate and the site didn't feel alive enough to stay engaged. The collectible aspect resonated with the community.
We combined two ideas here: give the community a larger selection of projects to support and keep working on the collection aspect. Projects selected by the community would have one day to fundraise, with donors racing for the top spot to earn the collectible, we lovingly named Artifact We kept working on public user profiles, where they could show off their collections.
Takeaway
This iteration was well received by donors, but creators felt like having only a day to collect donations. Even with a large following, it was difficult to rally fans and donors to donate on one specific day – too easy to miss.
With learnings of two previous cycles, I worked on combining the mechanisms that resonated the most with both Donors, Creators and Sponsors. A monthly cycle with multiple projects fundraising at the same time, where donors voted by minting the Artifacts. Simultanously creators were competing for the top spot and the Artizen Prize, funded by Sponsors.
Takeaway
This finally put the flywheel in motion – the different levels of competition made creators stay engaged and the donations rise fast
What else did we build?
After implementing dark mode accessibility, we observed a direct increase in session length during off-peak hours.
Each creator had a dedicated page for their project, where they could track their funding progress and showcase their ideas, motivations and team behind their work.
As a lot of the donation were micropayments, we experimented with utilizing crypto payments. Knowing a lot of our audience didn't have experience with wallets, we created a guided flow, putting a lot of thought into the language.
Users could build their public profiles that included a nice gallery of their collectibles.
Together with the public collections, a leaderboard tracking the most active or highest donors, tied together the community aspect.
While working on the product was my main focus, I also art directed and designed the identity, and did almost 30 illustrations big and small, most of them animated in a lightweight vector-based Lottie format.