Grapevine
Designing a giving platform that scales past manual setup
When I joined, Grapevine was the first product built for giving circles, where fifty people each put in $10, decide together where it goes, and give $500. There was a homepage, a few forms, and a Grapevine rep walking every leader through setup by hand. The circles themselves still ran on email, Venmo, paper checks, and the leader's spreadsheet.
Over five years I led UX and Product Design across the platform, working directly with the CEO and CTO. I designed the experiences that replaced all of it: leaders launch and run circles on their own, members join knowing what they're joining, and the member donations and grants to nonprofits were made on the platform.
Oct 2020 – Apr 2025
Led UX & product design
MVP to full platform
Designed end-to-end
90,000+
Members supported
$51 million
Total donations
I led the full design of Grapevine's platform, including a new homepage that communicated the value of community-based giving and the impact circles had created.
The leader problem
A circle leader is a volunteer, so the tools were whatever was at hand. A spreadsheet for members and their donation history, an email list for announcements, and a stack of paper checks to process. Keeping a group together was a lot of manual work across different touchpoints.
Moving a circle onto the platform meant a call with a Grapevine rep walking the leader through setup, which got the first circles on but was unlikely to scale past them.
Outcomes
- Self-service giving circle setup replaced hands-on Grapevine rep led onboarding
- Spreadsheets, Word docs, and email lists consolidated into one custom dashboard to manage the giving circle
- Donations collected and grants distributed through the platform, eliminating paper checks, Venmo requests, and manual tracking
Helping leaders get their giving circles off the ground
Onboarding was a challenging problem. Standing up a circle requires a lot of information, and a single long form would feel like a chore. The question was how to collect all of it while building the leader's confidence instead of draining it, letting them see their progress and feel the circle taking shape as they went.
I designed a mobile-first progressive onboarding flow that broke setup into three stages, each asking a little more as the leader's confidence built. First, they define the circle's purpose and donation goal. Second, they finalize the group page and invite collaborators. Third, they make the first donation and invite members. By the time a leader launched, they understood the product well enough to bring others into it.
The first stage is intentionally light. A few questions frame the giving circle before a leader moves on to customizing the group page.
The second stage is really important for confidence building. Rather than a settings form, I put leaders directly into their own group homepage, editing in place. Seeing the circle take shape, with its name and its cause and its goal, is what makes a leader want to launch it. Remaining setup steps stay pinned at the top of the page with a prominent Launch Group CTA to signal the finish line.
The second stage opens the giving circle page up for customization. Editing in place lets a leader see and feel the group before launching it, with setup steps and the launch CTA held at the top.
Launching their circle, the final stage, was designed as a moment worth celebrating, confetti, an encouraging message, and a clear next step. The goal was to send leaders into member recruitment feeling confident, not uncertain.
The decision that shaped the flow most was holding the leader's own first donation until this final step. The first dollar and the public launch became the same moment, so no leader ever sat on an inactive circle they'd already funded.
Launching triggers a celebration moment with one clear next step: be the first to donate. Holding the donation until launch meant leaders never had an inactive circle they had already given to.
Tools built for how leaders actually work
The first version of the leader experience was the member view with edit and open CTAs layered on top, a WYSIWYG approach that made sense early on but couldn't scale as more leaders joined the platform. As usage grew, it became clear that leaders needed real management tools, not just the ability to edit their group page.
The call was to stop treating the leader's tools as an extension of the member page and build them as their own surface. Leaders gave up editing what they saw in place, and got the tools running a circle actually takes: donation cycles, a member view, discussion, settings.
The leader dashboard brought together everything needed to run a giving circle, discussion posts, donation cycle management, a lightweight member CRM, and group settings in one place.
If the giving circle existed before joining Grapevine, the leader could bring in their existing members and past donation cycles so the platform started with their history instead of asking them to abandon it. Meeting a giving circle where it already was, was the difference between a leader trying the platform out and a leader moving the group to the platform.
Circles arrive with years of history in a spreadsheet. Import brings the roster and past giving in on day one, so a leader starts with their record rather than abandoning it.
Member donations & granting without paper checks
The member donation and giving circle grant was the last thing still happening off-platform. Members of the giving circle nominated nonprofits, voted, and then the leader wrote a check for the collective amount, mailed it, and typed the amount into a doc so the group had a record.
I designed donation collection and giving circle granting into the platform. Members give per cycle, the funds pool against the cycle, and once the group votes, the leader submits the donation to the winning nonprofit directly. The record keeps itself. The change was less about the donation transaction than about what stopped being a leader's job: no chasing individual members for their share, no check to mail, no ledger to maintain by hand, and a running total the whole group can see.
Once the vote closes, the leader sends the cycle's donations to the winning nonprofit from the same place the group decided. No check to mail, no ledger to update.
What changed for giving circle leaders
Leaders starting a circle get a self-serve flow that builds their confidence as they launch. Leaders bringing an existing circle over keep the full history of their impact. From there both run on one dashboard instead of a stack of tools and documents, with donations and grants happening in the same place the group makes its decision. The Grapevine rep who got the first circles on stopped being the only way onto the platform.
The member problem
Joining meant donating to a group whose model you might not yet understand, alongside people you might not know. The early flow was sign up, then donate. That works on a member a friend personally recruited. For everyone else, the ask arrives before the trust does.
The other half of the problem was already in a circle. Those members had been giving for years through a text thread, a Venmo request, and a show of hands someone tallied. They needed no convincing about the model or the people, only a process that survived the move.
Outcomes
- Platform grew from a few thousand members to 90,000 over the engagement
- Self-service onboarding delivers member value before the donation step, so trust is established before the first donation
- One digital home for the giving circle, replacing text threads, email lists, and spreadsheets
- Per-cycle giving on the platform replaced monthly Venmo requests and paper checks
- Every grant triggers an automated ask to the nonprofit for a thank-you that posts back to the group highlighting impact
Understanding the model before donating
I designed member signup around the same principle as leader onboarding: do not ask for a donation before the person understands what they are joining. A prospective member can access a landing page designed to educate. They see the group's mission, the members already in it, the nonprofits it has granted to and how much, a thank-you video from a past grantee, upcoming events, and what a quarterly donation means in terms of impact.
The commitment is per cycle, not one time. Naming that plainly at the moment of signup is the difference between a member who gives once and a member who stays.
Only after that does the join flow begin, and it is built to deepen the commitment. A member builds a profile, hearts the nonprofits they want to nominate later, flags the events they would show up for, and after donating, connects with the other members. The donation is per cycle rather than one time, which is the real commitment the flow is asking for, and the page has spent every section earning it first. By the time the donation is made, the member has a stake in the group, not just a donation receipt.
A member builds a profile and learns how a circle works before any money is asked for. The old flow was sign up, now donate, which only worked on members a friend had already convinced.
The donation cycles
The donation cycle defines the group's cadence. The group sets its length, a month or a quarter, and inside it the same sequence runs every time: members donate and nominate nonprofits, the group discusses them, the field narrows to three, the group votes, and the winner receives that cycle's donations.
Members can nominate and tell the group why they are nominating this nonprofit.
The platform is designed around that sequence. Nomination is open to any member, with the reason attached, and there is no minimum to nominate. Members heart nonprofits as they come across them, saving them for a future cycle. The leader configures the vote when posting it to the feed: one vote per member, or select-your-top-three when the field is large. Ties trigger a runoff. When the vote closes, the winner is what the leader submits the cycle's pooled donations to.
The leader sets the vote up when posting it: one vote per member, or top three when the field is large. Ties go to a runoff.
The feed carries the rest of it. Posts have types, and a meetup is one of them, with date, time, location, description, and RSVP status as required fields. Many of these circles are local and the giving is only part of what the group does together.
Group homepage showing feed types including pinned events, member posts and current donation cycle status.
What changed for members
A member joins understanding what a giving circle is. As part of a community, they donate, nominate the organizations they care about, vote on the three that make it to the final stage, cheer the final grant and see the result come back as a video or letter from the people who received it. The parts that used to be email chains or group text messages, a Venmo request and offline voting are now all on one platform.
The Results
Over five years, Grapevine grew into a platform supporting 90,000 members and $51 million in donations. The rep-assisted setup it started on gave way to experiences leaders run themselves: they launch and manage their circles independently, and new members are brought into groups through a guided onboarding flow. What began as manual workflows a small team stitched together by hand became a platform its own users operate.