Breeze

Breeze ChMS

What Breeze is

A subscription-based content management system created to meet the unique needs of churches and nonprofits. Breeze helps administrators organize volunteers, communicate with their members, and collect donations with ease.

• 10,000+ organizations
• 30,000+ users
• $10m in ARR
‍‍
Acquired by Tithe.ly in 2021

👥 People: Import, store, and export data from a person's profile, create custom profile fields,

🏷️ Tags: Manage groups of people, upload documents and assign tasks, and communicate through email or text.

🗓️ Events: Create events, reserve rooms, manage volunteers, and manage attendance through our Check-In app.

💳 Giving: Collect donations online or through text. Manage transactions and generate statements for givers

Main Dashboard - After

Main Dashboard - Before

How I made it better

Hired as the first and only product designer at Breeze, tasked with streamlining the overall user experience and establishing a design department at the company.

👥 Increased adoption by saving our primary users several hours each week through streamlining our core experience, making it easier to locate data, update records, customize and export reports, and communicate with staff.

💳 Grew the average number of weekly online donations through the launch of a mobile experience and more robust customization options for organizations' giving pages.

👷🏽 Led a front-end engineer through an audit of all existing UI components, developed a useable component library, and trained a team of 15+ engineers on adoption and implementation.

🎨 Advocated for and launched 3 design releases that provided critical visual consistency and a clearer content hierarchy for users across the entire platform.

💻 Created internal processes for regularly synthesizing user data from our analytics and customer support tools, encouraging data-driven product decisions and more efficiently targeting user segments for design discovery and marketing.

🐦 Introduced Pidge, a cute and friendly mascot personality, into product and marketing communications.

The First Redesign at Breeze

What went well

• 6 weeks of integrated user testing using surveys, feature rankings, and high-fidelity prototypes
• Synthesizing research results and aligning stakeholders with overall design vision
• Working closely with engineering leads to establish technical feasibility and design limitations
• Established a mobile experience that previously did not exist
• Successful Beta release to user groups of 500, 1,000, and 5,000 users
• Increased adoption due to feature adds like bulk actions, saved user preferences, and export formatting

Where we struggled

• Forcing too much functionality into a single release, as the project progressed we learned to work in shorter sprints and have faster releases
• Ownership overlap and undefined roles and responsibilities at the start of the project led to misalignment and "dropping the ball" on small details
• Our users really loved us. Getting meaningful and actionable feedback took iteration and context-setting, as well as working closely with CX to identify high value users
• Breeze was old, technically speaking. Our timeline was often interrupted by unforeseen hurdles that required us to reprioritize.

Core Experience - People Section

Before & AFter