Established in 1956, the Foundation Center is the leading source of information about philanthropy worldwide, connecting nonprofits who want to change the world to the funding resources they need to succeed. Their comprehensive database on grantmakers and their grants is delivered through an array of products, accessible online and at their library/learning centers.
Since March 2013, Whitney has worked with the Foundation Center across several of their product offerings, allowing her to play an instrumental role in establishing a standard, well-defined user experience practice within the organization. Through various workshops and coaching sessions with the newly-formed Prototyping team (made up of designers, developers and researchers across departments), she has provided extensive training on stakeholder research, user research, product strategy and usability testing.
Whitney’s work has influenced the following products at the Foundation Center:
- Foundation Stats, launched in November 2013, provides free and open access to a wealth of data on the most active U.S. foundations.
- Foundation Directory Online, currently undergoing redesign, is the Foundation Center’s subscription product providing access to 120,000+ foundations and corporate donors, 3 million recent grants and more than half a million key decision makers.
- Foundation Maps, beta released in March 2014, provides unprecedented visualizations of the Foundation Center’s vast database to reveal trends in philanthropic funding.
Our crowning moment was receiving feedback from a user who was able to utilize data we had made more easily accessible to gain funding for her fledgling nonprofit.
Thank you to Jake Garcia, Karolina Jamula-Mucha, David Wolcheck, Stephanie Hugh, Gordon Green, Thomas Provan, Erica Mobley, George Ford, and countless others at Foundation Center for inviting me to be a part of such a fun time in their organization’s growth. — Whitney
