Giving moments framework

Most giving on Facebook grew organically; people started birthday fundraisers, rallied friends around causes they cared about, and responded to the news as it happened. When the company wanted to support a cause, it usually gave directly: one amount, one donation, and the impact stopped there. We hypothesized that the same dollars could do more if they were used to boost the giving people were already doing on the platform.

I designed a framework for giving moments built on that idea. The framework spanned Facebook and Instagram, touching over a dozen user- and nonprofit-facing surfaces. All of them centered on using company funds as an incentive: people who created a fundraiser unlocked a seed donation to kickstart it, and people who donated had their gift matched.

The framework launched with the Giving Tuesday 2018 campaign, when people raised over $125M on the platform in a single day. Over the following years I was responsible for evolving the system: I stretched it from a single day to the whole giving season, brought it to Instagram with formats like multi-author stories, and shifted the incentives toward recurring donations that keep supporting nonprofits after the season ends.

The framework also let us respond quickly when a moment called for it. During the 2020 racial justice movement, I led design for a Juneteenth campaign that gave $19 to every fundraiser created for three racial justice organizations. The campaign and the fundraisers it sparked made Facebook a place where millions of Americans learned about Juneteenth, a year before it became a federal holiday. A year later, I led design for the UN’s COVAX vaccine campaign, which used $5M in seed donations to kickstart new fundraisers.