Bonterra Donation Forms

For over 20 years, through NGP VAN and EveryAction — Bonterra has supported Democratic campaigns and provided fundraising tools to over 15,000 nonprofits, helping raise billions of dollars. Donation forms are a critical part of those fundraising campaigns. In 2025, I led a complete redesign of both the donation forms and the form creation workflow.

My role

  • UX/UI Designer and Director

  • Researcher

  • Product Strategist

  • People Manager

The challenge

Creating donation forms and running campaigns with EveryAction and NGPVAN had become outdated and cumbersome. The antiquated features not only created friction for users but also resulted in significant design and engineering debt for Bonterra.

The solution

I set out to create a completely new, more efficient way for fundraisers to build donation forms. With recent advancements in generative AI, I saw an opportunity to automate much of the heavy lifting, removing the manual burden from users and streamlining the form creation process.

My initial concept began with a simple prompt, asking users to share who they are, what their goal is, and the impact they hope to achieve. This straightforward, conversational design was a significant departure from what users were used to — making it an ideal contrast to test and validate. To support this, I created a Figma prototype that participants could click through during moderated discovery interviews.

The prototype simulated the automated creation of a donation form based on the user's initial prompt. Users could then review and adjust a few campaign settings to finalize the form. Throughout the process, the system provided guidance and insights, explaining the rationale behind its decisions to help educate and build user confidence.

What I learned from the study

  • Fundraisers are increasingly trusting AI to generate content.

  • Many are already using AI to refine and improve fundraising copy.

  • Some hesitation remains around trusting AI to fully optimize donation form settings.

  • Starting with AI-generated content and allowing for human editing creates a powerful balance of efficiency and control.

Taking the concept to full feature design

With the concept validated, I moved into full feature design, covering both the donation form builder and the donation form experience itself. I partnered with one of Bonterra’s product development teams and collaborated with a Product Designer from my team to design the end-to-end AI-powered donation form builder, leveraging Bonterra’s latest design system for consistency and scalability.

To fully understand and refine the form-building experience, I used V0 to build the frontend prompting and chat interface. This allowed me to quickly create an interactive, real-time experience where I could define prompts and test the user flow dynamically — something that static mockups couldn’t capture and wouldn’t have been an efficient use of design time.

With the chat experience defined, I felt confident it was time to move into high-fidelity design to fully define the interface. I transitioned from V0 into Figma and used Bonterra’s newest design system, Stitch, to mock up the end-to-end flows for both the donation form creation workflow and the donor-facing donation forms. Throughout this process, I became deeply familiar with Stitch and identified gaps where new components were needed to support the interface requirements.

The final solution combines an AI-powered chat experience with manual form controls. Users can create a donation form by responding to a brief series of AI-generated prompts, which handles the heavy lifting of configuration. From there, users can review and fine-tune form settings as needed, striking a balance between automation and control.

Form Builder

Donor facing form

Conclusion

The new form builder and donation form have been built and are now live within Bonterra’s newly launched Non-Profit Hub. Through in-app feedback and user interviews, I’ll be measuring how well the feature is meeting users' needs and their satisfaction compared to the previous experience.

This initiative is a strong example of how I leveraged AI throughout the design process to increase efficiency and deliver a better user experience. By using AI-powered prototyping tools during discovery, I was able to test and refine concepts earlier and with greater confidence. In the final product, AI automates much of the form creation process, reducing friction for users while giving them greater control over customization. The result is a feature that’s not only faster to build, but also more powerful, intuitive, and easier for fundraisers to adopt.