ClassFund – John Pak

BRAND

Classfund

PROJECT

SUPPORTING TEACHERS AND STUDENTS

SUMMARY

Inequitable school funding creates a major gap for teachers and students to have access to even basic educational needs. Teachers need a way to cover school supplies and other projects without paying out of pocket.

OBJECTIVE

Create an app that provides different streams of financial support for teachers and classrooms, while making the process easy for teachers to setup and donors to give.

RESPONSIBILITIES

UX Researcher
UX Designer

SCOPE

2 weeks

TOOLS

Google Forms, Balsamiq, Sketch, Figma

DEFINING THE PROBLEM

Inequitable school funding is one of the first systemic barriers that young people of color and low-income youth come up against. Data shows that school districts attended predominantly by students of color receive $23 billion less in funding than primarily white districts— adding up to $2,200 less per student per year. Poor, predominantly white districts receive about $150 less per student than the national average. And the harm is multiplied when you recognize students of color and students from low-income communities often require more, not fewer, resources to create the inclusive learning environments they need to thrive.

The US K-12 public school system in impoverished areas is failing students, their families, and teachers in many ways due to a lack of school funding because typically schools are funded by local property taxes. This causes more programs to get cut, an increase in classroom size, and teachers getting paid less. My team was given the task to come up with a solution to supplement the disparity in school funding.

RESEARCH

In 2021, it is reported that teachers earn about 23.5% less than other professionals with similar education and experience.

In many parts of the country, teachers live below the family living wage. Up to a quarter of teachers leave the profession every year and about 20% resort to second jobs. Salary increases aren’t likely at the moment.

Teachers are sacrificing their own money to buy school supplies for their students because they are trying their best to not diminish the quality of education and provide the basic needs of their students due to budget cuts on the local and federal level.

EXPLORE

We decided to use surveys and interviews as the best way to gather qualitative data. By surveying actual teachers and then interviewing the teachers who were willing to participate we were able to delve deeper. We also wanted to gauge the level of empathy from potential parents/donors towards teachers and their willingness to give.

Explore: Teacher Survey Results

We surveyed actual teachers in different school districts to find out firsthand to better understand the financial challenges of teachers and how they feel.

Explore: Non-Teacher Surveys

We surveyed the general population to understand their awareness and attitudes towards teacher salaries. Also to understand their willingness to donate directly to help teachers improve their classrooms.

Explore: Teacher Interviews

Interviewing is always tricky. Questions should open discussions for discovery versus leading users towards validating your own personal ideas. Our interviews provided supportive material, which was in line with the research we had compiled.

During the interviews, we also asked how teachers currently received any financial support and discussed how donors currently donate, if at all. We also asked teachers where they generally like to shop and purchase school supplies for their classrooms. Are their requests for the classroom only simple items or sometimes bigger items? We asked donors why, where, what, and how they currently donate or why they do not donate?

DISCOVERY

Discovery : Teacher Insights

What we discovered was that teachers liked to shop at:

– These stores pretty much carried what they needed and another reason was simply because they would get gift cards from classroom parents, friends, and family as donations or sometimes teachers would request for them and forgo their own wants/needs for Christmas, birthdays, and other holidays.

– The actual costs for supplies did not always come directly from their paychecks, but from personal trade offs for the betterment of their students.

– They also shared that money was not only spent on basic fundamental student needs like paper, pencils, crayons, and pens, but bigger items like building a bookshelf and then filling the bookshelves with books.

– Sometimes, the teachers wanted to take the kids on a field trip or create special projects to supplement what the students learned in their classes.

– The teachers would try to do fund raisers to support bigger asks or projects, but the outcome was limited due to the costs to even initially create and execute one properly.

Discovery : Donor Insights

– Donors and potential donors biggest concerns were if their donations were really being used for their intended reason or just getting watered down paying for executives and operational costs.

– Donors would feel better and even donate more if they knew 100% of their donation was being directly transferred to the class or teacher versus just an organization.

– Some potential donors who thought about donating, simply were not sure where they wanted to donate, what to donate, and how to donate.

Understand

Through the discovery, we began to understand how to implement their needs into the app as a function for the teachers and donors. The insights we gained helped us to decide on building a mobile app focused on allowing teachers to create a registry wish list and/or project go-fund-me, which donors could view, purchase, and/or donate, to support a teacher’s class. Once the teacher signs up We also added “message facts” during the payment processing to educate and to fill the waiting time.

BUILDING AN MVP

I felt inspired knowing this data and immediately began white boarding to build out the entry user flow for teachers and donors to get started.

User Flow for Teachers