Showcase 2 / 3

Donation tracking & audit conceptualised

Summary

Public trust in charitable giving is often shaken by concerns over fraud, misuse of funds, and opaque money handling. These issues can turn an act of goodwill into a leap of faith for donors. Donations are untraceable.

Background

3 development attempts had failed, and other prospective agencies were unresponsive. Without a clear specification, previous teams were forced to guess, often mistaking the donation tracking system for a standard donation platform. The issue was in comprehension, not engineering.

Role Product strategy, service design, user experience, interface design, product management

Tech Confluence, Jira, Figma, Tailwind CSS, Next.js, Prisma, PostgreSQL, AWS

Problems

One

Incomprehensible brief: The dev brief consisted of 50+ interlinked documents with the data modelling in a 30-tabs spreadsheet. Critical business logic was buried in walls of text.

Two

Built from ground up: Spanning across accounting, banking, legal trust, logistics, e-commerce, and CSR, every domain had to be modelled from scratch with no room for heuristics.

Three

Product feasibility: Open banking access varies by country and bank. There was no guarantee the data flow we needed would even be available.

Product workshop

To start, I ran daily sessions with the founder until we reached enough shared understanding of the product. I then simplified the original material into a 7-page product brief to be sent to development agencies for quotation. After the rewrite, agency response rate increased from 10% to 80%.

**Money versus data flows** To emphasise that DonAid doesn't collect money, I mapped out the money and reporting flows

**Comparing donor journeys** I compared a typical user journey with the proposed donation tracking from the donor's perspective to clarify how donation tracking works

Feasibility study

I surveyed banking and messaging integrations to map what could be automated, what needed vendor buy-in, and what required a manual fallback. Where banks moved too slow, I proposed processing the banking side manually as an interim workaround.

**Surveying available banking data** CSV bank statements are easier to sanitise than PDFs, and cut dev effort if we build our own ingestion

**Messaging services** We decided to use WhatsApp API directly, no middleware markup, lower cost per transaction

Work scoping

I split the brief into Demo, MVP, and Feature Complete phases. I also shifted the founder's mindset to agile workflow.

**Simplifying donation status: Demo vs MVP** Edge cases were scoped out of Demo and MVP, pushed to later phases.

**Information architecture** Sitemap covering the product and marketing pages, prioritised by stakeholder's needs.

Interface design

Design was not in the agency's scope. I stepped in and delivered interfaces and flow diagrams in sync with dev milestones.

**Sketching wireframes:** Throughout my product workshops with the founder, I sketched wireframes and flow diagrams ad-hoc to build shared understanding. The high-fidelity design was later reviewed and approved in Figma before I handed over code as React TypeScript components, styled with Tailwind CSS, to the dev team.

Engineering check-ins

I ran weekly check-ins, taking progress reports from the dev team while handing over design for the next task. I bridged the founder and dev across system design, business logic, architecture, and acceptance criteria.

Product core feature

DonAid's main scope is to verify a donation after the transaction and track the money received from a campaign partner to the auditing trustee and finally released to the charity.

**Service blueprint:** Aligning teams and stakeholders for what DonAid is

Feature one

Donation tagging

Upon a successful donation transaction with the campaign partner, the POS then requests a unique tag for the donation to be printed as a QR code in the receipt which allows the donor to track the progress of the donation

Feature two

Public tracking

Akin to parcel tracking, the donation progress is laid out in a timeline. A summary of the current status at the top provides a general overview of the donation. The tracker can get a notification on WhatsApp for the progress of the donation

Feature three

Reporting

Each step generates a unique report. Donation transactions are batched into an acknowledgement report, compiled into a remittance report for the campaign partner, then closed with a settlement advice once the trustee releases funds to the charity.

Outcome

The final delivery hit a foreseeable delay for the bank integration scope since the founder and the team had agreed to push ahead despite the flag to omit it.

**Demo homepage:** Five demo sites for different types of donation collection by partnership

After the demo deployment, the founder and I had conducted a market-fit demonstration. All 32 attendants from various charity organisations expressed interest in the product and demonstrated a thorough understanding how donation tracking works.

Insights

Insight one

Product clarity for team alignment

The earlier teams failed because there was no shared understanding of the product, not for lack of effort.

Insight two

Design is thinking made visual

Diagrams and designs turned abstract explanations into artefacts the team could see, challenge, improve, and execute.

Insight three

Cross-functional fluency mitigates risks

Working across product, design, and engineering helped me spot gaps early before they became costly mistakes.