Background: empowering small nonprofits to communicate better

Background

WildApricot (by Personify) is a SaaS membership platform used by 40,000+ nonprofits and associations to manage members, events, websites, and email communication.
As Product Content Manager, my role was to communicate product benefits clearly, helping customers understand new features and get the most value from our platform.
I worked closely with Marketing, Product, Design, and Support to ensure user feedback informed our educational content and in-app messaging.

WildApricot marketing site on a laptop: Manage Your Organization All in One Place

Wild Apricot Users Group on Facebook, 1.6K members

Webinar thank-you slide shown to the Users Group

Discovery: users struggled with email readability

~20% of support tickets mentioned issues with the email builder and its limitations.
Only around 12–15% of active users regularly use the email builder.
Users asked how to make their newsletters "look more professional" or "easier to read."
In our Facebook Users Group (1.6K members), admins shared screenshots asking for design feedback.
Our designer noticed similar issues across customer examples: small fonts, cluttered layouts, poor contrast.

Solution: designing an onboarding experience that meets users where they are

Partnered with a designer to brainstorm how to support users the first time they opened the email editor.
Explored ideas → chose an interactive in-app tutorial for immediacy and engagement.
Designed supporting visual elements and mockups in Figma.
Built and tested the full walkthrough in a Gainsight PX sandbox to preview copy and visuals in context.
Brought in the Product Lead to confirm feasibility and align with sprint timelines.
Shared the sandbox version with the dev team to configure triggers and deploy the live release.

Impact versus effort matrix: the interactive walkthrough sits in high impact, low effort — Impact vs. effort—the interactive walkthrough won on both.

In-product walkthrough in the email editor

When users compose a new email in WildApricot's email editor, they see an in-product walkthrough with some typography best practices.

The walkthrough as users see it in the email editor.

Top-performing engagement

Launched on August 18, 2020
Most-viewed engagement in August with 7,169 total views
22% completion rate

The light-hearted copy, simple language, and helpful insights are likely the reasons why this engagement out-performed other WildApricot engagements that month.

Customer feedback:

"A big thank you for the tips on the newsletter received when writing my newsletter. They were such a help and my newsletter looks heaps better, not to mention the spacing!"

Also, here's my article on creating mobile-friendly emails in WildApricot.

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