Campaigns, Funds & Appeals —
from flat lists to living dashboards

The Problem

Fundraisers were flying blind inside their own CRM

Bloomerang's Campaigns, Funds, and Appeals sections were purely administrative — flat paginated tables that showed you what existed, but told you nothing about how it was performing. Name, status, date range, amount raised. That was it.

To answer even a basic question — how is our Spring Campaign tracking against goal? — a fundraiser had to leave the page entirely, navigate to Reports, manually configure filters, run the report, and interpret the output. Every insight required a trip through the report builder. For organizations running multiple campaigns, funds, and appeals simultaneously, this wasn't just inefficient — it was a barrier that kept people from using the data they were already tracking.

Before State

A list of names, a handful of columns, nothing actionable

The starting point was a flat table — campaigns sorted by name, with columns for status, type, date range, raised amount, goal, and % to goal. Clicking into a campaign gave you its settings. No charts, no trends, no breakdowns. Just the same administrative fields you used to create it.

The same pattern repeated across Funds and Appeals. Three sections of the product, all structured the same way: lists that managed records, but never helped users understand them.

The new campaigns list (top) showing at-a-glance status and metrics, and the campaign detail dashboard (bottom) replacing what was previously a blank settings page

Design Process

Built and tested in parallel, iterated with users at every stage

This project used a different process than a typical design cycle. Rather than sketching in isolation and returning weeks later with polished mockups, working prototypes were built using Claude, Figma AI, and MCP — and brought directly into user conversations while they were still rough.

That shift changed what was possible in a single session. Instead of presenting one direction and gathering reactions, multiple approaches could be tested, adjusted, and compared in real time. Users weren't describing what they thought they wanted — they were responding to something they could actually interact with.

The project ran through multiple rounds of user research, with design evolving after each one. Nothing was finalized between rounds and presented as complete — the process stayed open and responsive throughout.

Exploration

Every chart type, every layout — explored before committing

Before settling on the final dashboard composition, a systematic exploration of chart components was conducted across all three sections. Revenue mix visualizations alone went through seven variations — different color treatments, data groupings, and comparison approaches — before the right balance emerged.

Component exploration across revenue mix, donor lifecycle, gift range distribution, year-over-year growth, and pace-to-goal chart types

Navigation structure exploration — testing how Campaigns, Funds, and Appeals should sit within Bloomerang's information architecture across two and three-level nav models

Prototype Evolution

Three surfaces, iterated in parallel

Campaigns, Funds, and Appeals each followed the same pattern but required different dashboard compositions. Campaigns needed pace-to-goal tracking and breakdown by appeal. Funds needed year-over-year cumulative performance. Appeals needed gift range distribution and donor lifecycle comparisons. Each section developed through its own research arc while sharing a consistent design system.

Funds, Appeals, and Campaigns dashboards side by side — three distinct dashboard compositions built on the same underlying system

Appeals — list and prototype iterations

Funds — list and prototype iterations

Final Designs

Data that was always there, finally visible

Each section got a dedicated dashboard built around the questions fundraisers actually ask — not just what data happened to be easy to surface. Clicking into any campaign, fund, or appeal now shows an immediately readable picture of performance, with every element clickable to launch a pre-filtered report for deeper investigation.

That last detail — click-through to reports — was deliberate. The dashboard isn't meant to replace reporting; it's meant to make the path to reporting instant. Instead of starting from a blank report builder, users start from a question the dashboard already surfaced for them.

Campaign detail dashboard — key metrics, pace-to-goal chart, revenue breakdown by appeal, revenue mix, donor lifecycle comparison, and campaign goal history across fiscal years

Custom date range view — the same dashboard adapts to show data for any time period, with fund revenue breakdown replacing the campaign breakdown

Empty state design — when no revenue goal is set, the dashboard prompts users to set one rather than showing a blank chart

Funds detail dashboard — year-over-year cumulative performance chart, fund revenue breakdown, revenue mix, and donor lifecycle across fiscal years

Appeals detail dashboard — key metrics with prior year comparison, gift range distribution, revenue mix with year-over-year comparison, donor lifecycle mix, and breakdown by appeal code

Broader Context

One approach, applied across six months of product work

This wasn't a one-off experiment. The same AI-assisted design method — rapid prototyping, live iteration, multi-round user research — was applied across a sustained six-month stretch of product work at Bloomerang, spanning campaigns, funds, appeals, bulk data update and delete tooling, and data visualization work.

The shift wasn't just in the tools used, but in the rhythm of the work. Faster prototyping meant more time in front of users. More time in front of users meant fewer assumptions carried into final designs. The AI tooling compressed the distance between "idea" and "testable thing" — which changed what was possible in a single research session.

Impact

The data was always there. Now it's just there.

The most meaningful shift wasn't adding new data — it was removing the steps between users and data they already owned. Before, every insight required a deliberate detour through the report builder: configure filters, choose columns, run the report, interpret results. After, the same information is visible the moment you open a campaign.

The addition of click-through report launching from any dashboard element further collapsed that gap. Users don't just see that their Spring Campaign is behind pace — they can immediately drill into why, with the report pre-configured from the chart they were already looking at.

The feature was in development at the time of writing and had not yet fully shipped — but the design direction was validated across multiple rounds of user research, with fundraisers consistently describing the dashboards as the first time they felt like the CRM was working with them, not making them work for it.

Reflections

What this changed about how I design