Is your organization tackling problems and topics that address society’s most pressing issues? Is your audience having trouble interacting with or understanding your offering? Each year, we have a dedicated and talented team of designers, researchers, and strategists ready to partner with non-profits or social enterprises seeking to improve or create experiences for the under-represented groups.
About the program
In 2020, Blink launched its pro bono design program to help organizations increase their impact and further their mission through evidence-driven design. We focus on solving problems by putting the people we are designing for at the heart of the process. This way, the solutions we create are tailored to their specific needs. Our goal is to combine your organization’s mission with our UX strategy, research, and product design expertise in order to drive social change and positively impact your community.
How it works
- Blink selects a non-profit organization or social enterprise to partner with this summer on a pro bono basis. Blink will cover nearly all the costs of the project, with the exception of participant recruiting fees for conducting user research. These costs typically range from $1,500 - $2,000 depending on the types of participants we bring in for research and we ask that our partner organization cover these expenses to participate in the program.
- Once selected, the client will work closely with a team of UX strategists, researchers, and designers to better understand their UX challenges and reimagine, design, or develop a user-centered product. Products can include apps, devices, websites, and software — in short, any touchpoint your organization has with your users.
- At the end of the project, clients have a design solution ready for implementation. Project deliverables can include design strategy, research insights, concept development and testing, and prototypes.
Program timeline
February: Applications open
March/April: Application review & application interviews
April: Applications closed Monday, April 14, at 9:00 AM PST.
Early May: Wrap up applicant interviews, final selection/project awarded
Late May: Project scoping
June: Project start
August: Project wrap-up
Our ideal client
To be considered for the program, applicants must be an organization or company with a social impact mission and a UX project that fits into a 10-week timeframe. We ask that partner organizations allow us to share our work and be committed to implementing it in the near future. Minority-owned companies and organizations with initiatives centering on underrepresented groups are strongly encouraged to apply.
We’d love to work with organizations and companies that operate in one of the following fields:
- Arts and Culture
- Civil Rights
- Education
- Environment
- Health and Wellness
- Poverty
- Racial Equity
If this sounds like your organization or company, we'd love to hear from you!
Project ideas
The types of UX challenges we can tackle with you as part of a research and design project include:
- Communicate your mission through data visualization and digital storytelling
- Build a vision for a delightful mobile app
- Establish a new brand grounded in a digital experience
- Take a concept and turn it into a buildable product
- Craft a digital experience for onboarding users, customers, or volunteers
- Design and evaluate an out-of-box experience for users, customers, or volunteers
- Optimize an employee's workflow using digital tools
- Create a holistic design system from disparate touchpoints
Stay in the loop for next year's applications:
Past pro bono work
Partner to Decide
The pregnancy experience can be fraught with overwhelming decisions and confusing provider interactions. That’s why Partner to Decide seeks to improve decision-making in maternity care.
Partner to Decide came to Blink to transform its existing decision-aid pamphlet into a comprehensive web and mobile experience that would allow patients to make evidence-based, values-aligned decisions about labor induction.
Case study: Empowering value-aligned decisions in pregnancy care.
Wellspring
Resources for families experiencing housing insecurity are hard to find, with unknown eligibility and discouraging dead-ends.
Wellspring came to Blink to revolutionize a tool to help families in crisis, and caseworkers get better access to curated, personalized resources. We designed a new, mobile-first app that provides easy ways to search and save personalized resources.
Case study: Ending the cycle of family homelessness.
Rescuing Leftover Cuisine (RLC)
RLC is a food rescue organization with a threefold mission: to make food rescue sustainable, eliminate food waste, and make food hunger a thing of the past.
The organization works with volunteers — or “rescuers” — to transport food from local donors to shelters, soup kitchens, and human resource centers in its local communities. RLC partnered with Blink to uncover the best way to attract, retain, and support new and current rescuers through a reimagined online volunteer platform.
Case study: Improving the online experience for food rescue volunteers.
ImpactMapper
ImpactMapper helps consumers invest in companies that positively impact the climate, human rights, and the planet. Through its platform, HERO Index, ImpactMapper transforms qualitative data into quantitative insights to show companies’ impact on environmental and social issues to help investors decide if company values align with their own.
Blink worked with ImpactMapper to design and prototype an engaging, visually stunning website, which the organization used to secure development funding.
Case study: Designing a research platform for values-based investors.
Sistahbiz Global Network
Sistahbiz is a global network focused on coaching, training, and providing services to help Black women entrepreneurs to build and expand their businesses from small side hustles into sustainable enterprises. At the heart of the Sistahbiz network is access to coaching, the community, and resources.
Blink partnered with Sistahbiz to do research, strategy, and design for its membership platform, both current state and future vision.
Welfie
Welfie is a health platform currently focused on heart health and is extending into diagnosing and tracking COVID-19. Blink partnered with the Welfie team to fortify the existing Welfie experience while evolving COVID-19 features to help students, parents, teachers, and K-12 school administrators return to the classroom safely and confidently.
