Turning funders into advocates, within what we could legally claim

Context

Trees That Count is a New Zealand conservation platform connecting people who fund native tree planting with the planters who do it. I was an in-house Product Designer there from January 2024 to June 2025. This was a solo design effort that ran cross-functionally with a PM, the marketing manager, and developers.

The platform already had strong word-of-mouth growth. People liked telling others they'd funded trees. But what they could say was thin: "I funded X trees." That number didn't capture what the contribution meant, and it didn't give anyone else a reason to join in.

The problem

There was a communication barrier on the platform's best growth channel. Funders wanted to talk about their environmental contribution, but the only language available to them was a raw tree count. They understood they'd done something good. They couldn't articulate why it mattered in terms that would move their own networks.

That capped organic growth. Every funder who couldn't confidently describe their impact was a referral that didn't happen. So I treated the design problem as advocacy: giving existing funders the tools and the language to bring other people in. Reframing the brief from "how do we convert" to "how do we equip our funders to be advocates" shaped the whole project.

My role

Solo designer on this, working cross-functionally. I led the design strategy, ran the investigation into what we could and couldn't claim, and designed the experience across the touchpoints involved. The PM, the marketing manager, and the developers were my collaborators. The legal and compliance review that governed every claim was a hard external constraint I had to design within, and I didn't control it.

The call I'd point to as most mine was treating this as an advocacy problem instead of a conversion one. I also sequenced the rollout so the riskiest, most coordination-heavy part (defensible impact claims) was proven on a small surface before expanding.

Approach

I started with a constraint question: what impact data could we extract from what we already held, and what were we legally allowed to say about it? Environmental impact claims can't be marketed however you like. Overstate them and you expose the organisation. So before any of the experience work, I investigated the data we had and the boundaries on communicating it.

Then I rolled it out as a proof of concept first. I led with project pages as the test surface: translate the funding into meaningful, defensible impact and see how users responded. Once the team saw a positive response there, we expanded the same approach into the donation flow (live impact at the point of giving) and the funder dashboard (cumulative impact over time). Proving it small first was deliberate, given how much cross-functional coordination and compliance review each claim carried.

The core design work was translation: turning an abstract tree-funding figure into environmental impact expressed in terms a funder could understand and repeat with confidence. Every one of those translated measures had to clear legal and compliance sign-off before it could appear.

Collaboration & method

The defining feature of this project was that every impact claim went through formal legal and compliance sign-off. That's unusual for a design project and it shaped everything. I couldn't design a metric, ship it, and iterate. Each claim had to be both meaningful to a funder and legally defensible, and those two pressures pull in different directions. A claim airtight enough for legal can be lifeless to a user. A claim vivid enough to share can overstate. Most of the work was finding measures that satisfied both at once and getting them through review.

That meant heavy cross-functional coordination. I worked with the PM on scope and sequencing, with the marketing manager on how the impact language would carry beyond the product into comms, and with developers on building the touchpoints. All of it sat behind the gating constraint of compliance approval. The one-month timeline was tight for that many dependencies, which is why I sequenced it as proof-of-concept-then-expand instead of trying to land all three touchpoints at once.

Constraints & tradeoffs

• No impact measure shipped without formal compliance sign-off. That made things slower and left less creative freedom on the language. An overstated environmental claim is a real organisational risk, and a credible claim is also a more shareable one, so the constraint was worth it.
• Project pages came first, then the donation flow and dashboard. That was slower to reach full impact, but it de-risked the coordination and let the team see evidence before committing to the harder surfaces.
• I optimised for equipping existing funders to bring others in, instead of for a direct conversion metric. The payoff is more diffuse and harder to attribute cleanly. Word-of-mouth was already the platform's strongest channel and this fed it directly, which is why I made that call.

What shipped

An impact-storytelling system across three touchpoints over roughly a month: project pages (the proof of concept), the donation flow (live impact shown at the point of giving), and the funder dashboard (cumulative impact over time). Each translated tree-funding into environmental impact measures that had cleared formal legal and compliance review. That gave funders concrete, credible language to describe and share their contribution. The same measures then fed into marketing comms beyond the product.

Outcome

The evidence here is directional, not hard. Preliminary data pointed to increased engagement on the funder dashboard and an uplift in average donation, helped by being able to use these impact measures across marketing comms. I don't have firm, measured figures for either, so I treat them as directional signals.

What I'm confident about is the qualitative result: the core communication problem was solved. Funders went from "I funded X trees" to being able to describe their environmental impact in specific, credible terms they were comfortable sharing. The system also cut down the manual impact-report requests the team had been fielding. In summary, a fairly small change in how data was presented gave funders a much better advocacy tool. There were early signals it was working, and the harder ROI measurement was left undone.

Reflection

The part I'd defend hardest is the reframe to advocacy. The instinct on a growth brief is to chase conversion metrics. The more valuable move here was recognising that the platform grew through word-of-mouth, and the bottleneck was that funders lacked the language to feed it. Design's job was to hand them that language.

What I'd do differently is obvious from the Outcome: get proper measurement in place before launch. The directional signals were encouraging but I can't point to a hard number. For a project whose whole thesis is "better tools drive more advocacy," that measurement gap is the thing I'd close. I think the work was right, and the proof of it is softer than I'd like because of how measurement was set up.