Corporate Rewards: Employee Experience
Introduction
This corporate social responsibility product is working toward an all-in-one reward experience. The goal is to increase engagement in client programs by encouraging employees to log acts of social good such as donations and volunteering. However, employees struggle to find and manage opportunities in this CSR product with the current architecture.
Discovery: Employee reward experience
Imagine you go to Blackbaud Cares to log a donation you made to your favorite charity that you hope will qualify for a matching donation. You might struggle to find the requirements for the Blackbaud employee matching gift program, or forget exactly what the steps are to log your donation, or even have trouble checking the processing status of that matching donation after the fact since all of the actions live in a different area of the site.
This is common among employee users, especially for the majority of employees that only log into CSRconnect 1-2 times a year. Based on reports from our customer support teams, we know that the current experience makes it difficult for employees to find what they need to do to earn and track benefits from their employer's program(s).
From March to May of 2023, the customer support team received 3,022 tickets from employees related to rewards topics including program guidelines, how to request a [donation] match and volunteer incentives.
Some examples of these pages include:
Engagement elements: program details
CSR help & support page
My volunteering: volunteer activity page
Incentives: volunteer incentive program modal
Test Set up
Hypothesis:
If reward information is presented in a central location, then employee users will more easily find the information they need, such as program requirements and how to log an activity. This should result in a reduction in support tickets for internal CSR teams and questions for client administrators.
Goals:
Understand what motivates employees to participate and log activities for their employer’s social good programs. 
Measure the perceived comprehension of programs compared to previous design iterations.
Create a new area of the site that includes all the information a user needs to see and can be built on for later iterations.
Round 1 - prototype test:
6 users
Users were presented with 2 pages of information, one an overview of their personal activity and the second a detailed page about the company program. Overall users found the pages easy to understand and navigate. They enjoyed having their reward program information for donations and volunteering in one place.
However, first impressions of the overview revealed that there was a lot of information for employees to digest. Most users suggested they might prefer a simpler overview. Users stated that their program progress and unused rewards were the most useful information, while the redemption history was repetitive since the program detail page included a similar, but narrowed, log of activities.
We used these findings and altered the test to include a second design version for comparison. We removed the redemption history since it was considered repetitive, and it added a lot of data to the page without any specific action for the user to take.
Round 2 - A/B test:
5 users
After viewing version A, the design used in round 1, and version B, the design without redemption activity, each user was asked which version they preferred; all of the participants preferred A. Even though the redemption activity was the information we decided to remove from the first overview page due to the feedback in round 1, the majority of users stated that the main reason they preferred version A was that the redemption activity feed was important information to see on the overview page.
Summary
How easy or difficult was it to understand the information on this/these page[s] (1 very difficult - 5 very easy)?
Round 1: 4 | Round 2: 4.5
How likely would you be to navigate to this page to take action on a matching donation/volunteering (1 unlikely - 5 very likely)?
Round 1: 4.5 | Round 2: 4.7
Across both rounds of testing, users not only called out that it was nice to have rewards for different types of activities in one place, but that it was helpful to have the program data and details accessible in the same place as well.
We now know that the most valuable information for CSRconnect employee users is their unused rewards, logged activities, and redemption history. Employees come to the site to check the status of activities they have already logged and to take specific actions, i.e. log new activities or address issues with a previously logged action. From this study, it is clear that users prefer an experience where this information is in a central location.
“A really nice hub page to see what I've done and take care of anything I haven't." - Employee user
“This could make it easier to direct employees."
- CSRconnect Technical Support Manager
Tea, Please.
