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Laura Hertz, CEO and Co-Founder of Gifts for Good: “We wanted it to feel like a modern consumer app, even though our target market is more corporate-gifting”
Corporate gifting gives companies an opportunity to recognize employees, strengthen client relationships, and show appreciation. But making those gifts feel personal and intentional can be a challenge. Add in the logistics, from compiling names and addresses to selecting gifts, managing budgets and coordinating shipping, and the process quickly becomes a burden for already busy employees, especially at scale.
Laura Hertz knew technology could help tackle this problem, so she founded Gifts for Good, which gives organizations a way to show recognition in a more meaningful way by supporting nonprofit and social enterprise partners. As time went on and customer needs evolved, the team decided to redesign its corporate gifting software, formerly known as GIFTforward. This year’s launch introduces a self-directed option for companies of all sizes to set up and send their own gift programs, while continuing to offer expert-directed services.
In this interview, Hertz discusses why building a better customer experience means giving people the flexibility to work the way they want, how the team balanced simplicity with functionality during the redesign, and what it takes to build technology that can accommodate customers as their needs grow.
What prompted the decision to redesign the Gifts for Good platform? What did you want the new experience to achieve?
When we started, Gifts for Good had a B2C website and we also did custom corporate gifting. About seven years ago, we launched Gift Forward, our corporate gifting platform. It eventually grew to become the majority of our business, revenue and website traffic. The initial offering had reached the point where we were outgrowing what it could do, prompting us to rebuild into the platform we have today.
We wanted to scale our users’ independence. When we started, it was more bespoke. One of the big features of our new platform is that it’s a self-service platform. So users can come in, sign up, create a campaign and send gifts without having to speak to our team.
The old platform wasn’t really built for that. It felt very old-school and patched together as a platform and as a service. It didn’t reflect the high quality platform that we wanted to put out in the world and have people experience. In that format, we couldn’t have it be self-servicing because there wasn’t really an intuitive journey that users could take to create their own gift campaigns. People like to explore on their own, they don’t necessarily like having to book a demo or talk to a salesperson. So, one of the restrictions of our growth was that people couldn’t just start using the platform. They couldn’t get started without talking to someone from our team.
For the new platform, I kept coming back to wanting the experience to feel “buttery smooth.” We wanted it to feel like a modern consumer app, even though our target market is more corporate-gifting.
Who were you designing the new platform for, and what did those users need to be able to accomplish?
We envisioned a number of different personas using the platform. One example is an executive assistant who’s responsible for holiday gifting for an internal team or helping wealth managers send gifts to their particular clients. The same applies to marketing managers and heads of customer success who are sending client appreciation gifts during the holidays. We wanted to create a platform that was really useful, helpful for them to be able to log in, send ad hoc gifts and create that whole experience all by themselves.
We really targeted the new platform at that individual user. Often they’re a small team that will need only one or two accounts, but we also really tried to think of how we could build it out for multiple teams that would operate within an organization, but from one account.
For example, we worked with KPMG on a gifting structure that supported their consultancy clients. There were a dozen or so account directors, who had, say, 20 to 30 people they wanted to send gifts to, and an individual person who oversaw the gifts for those account directors. In turn, those account directors were organizing their own gifting. We built an enterprise group layer structure to support that particular need.
Internal gifting is also one of our primary use cases. HR and people teams, some of our biggest clients, use the platform for employee recognition, anniversaries and other occasions. For example, we started working with Zoom a few years ago on employee recognition and anniversary gifting.
Being able to support that kind of gifting is a big advantage of the new platform. We couldn’t easily support it on the old platform because it required a lot of repetitive work that has now been automated.
What were the biggest UX and technical priorities for the redesign? Were there underlying technology changes that made the new experience possible?
The user experience and user interface priorities we mentioned above were at the top of our list. We needed a more intuitive self-service experience. There’s a phrase I like to use, your new stylesheet built on top of your old stylesheet isn’t just the new stylesheet, it’s every element of the previous build. I used to call it the Jenga Tower of web apps because there were a number of technologies layered on top of each other. It was time to start over.
Now we give the old platform a very hard time, but it became clear as we launched the new version that in our goal for simplification, there were some old elements that have evolved over time that really made sense.
As we relaunched, we had the sales team flagging features that no one really hears about, but was a really important feature that needed to be built back in. You want to be careful not to simplify too much. We had lost some of the core features that developed over time that were previously thought of as fluff and too heavy a feature set but actually ended up being really important.
How did you make the platform easier to navigate, particularly for brands managing more complex gifting programs?
Number one, you need to choose your gift collection. We’ve made that really easy.
Number two, you may want to edit your gift collection. Maybe there are some gifts within a particular price tier you don’t necessarily want people to see or receive, or you favor some gifts over others. You can either delete some from collections, or you can change the order of the collection through a drag and drop interface.
Number three is the ability to upload recipients, which you could do with the old system but it wasn’t intuitive. Now we give users two new options, one way is by putting out a universal redemption link. The other way is sending out manual gift links, which is a unique link per user.
And then of course, building their campaigns, how it looks, how it sounds. We’ve made it really easy for people to edit the initial gift email that gets sent out to people. We’ve created the ability to change branding, so you can upload and crop a banner, you can change the button colors to match your branding. You can upload a logo to be at the top of the email.
When it came to paying for the campaigns, gift credits and everything surrounding it was really complicated. It’s real money that you’re helping people manage so you have to be very careful about how everything is structured. So, we revamped the entire credit system. You can load up your account with credits ahead of time, and then you can send out gift campaigns using your account credits. Or, you can purchase new credits at the time of checkout and launching your gift campaign.
Our basic campaign type is that you pay at the time of creation, either with credits on the platform or with a credit card. So for every person you’re sending it to, you pay a flat fee for each one, with tax and shipping included in the price.
Additionally, we introduced an option to pay-as-you-give, where customers put down a 40% deposit on the total campaign budget and your gift budget is calculated by the number of recipients you have and the gift value tier you want them to redeem at. As the redemptions approach 40%, we charge the card on file in small increments to make sure there is always enough money in your gift budget. The charges never exceed the total campaign budget so there are no nasty billing surprises.
One of the issues with the previous system was that, because it was built piecemeal, sometimes it was hard to reconcile the back and forth between the previous platform and backend systems. Now, it’s fully integrated.
Another important piece was impact reporting. Every gift we offer has a measurable impact, and we wanted customers to be able to access that information directly on the platform, in real time. We built an automated reporting engine that takes the granular impact data from every gift redeemed, and feeds it back into the platform. Customers can now see their impact over time and get updates on individual campaigns, which they really appreciate.
For brands evaluating corporate gifting platforms, what should they look for to determine whether a platform is easy to use and can support their needs as they grow?
Easy! Make sure you can talk to a human.
A lot of gifting platforms are being automated and a lot of the ones on the market have scale in mind, but we focus on making sure that each client is serviced based on their particular needs.
Gifting is so personal, having a person alongside you is pretty good. But one of the reasons we rolled out the self-service function is because we wanted to give people that ultimate option. Some people like both. They love to be able to explore for themselves and they want to carry on, but they also want to be able to fall back and really talk to someone if they need to.
Look for a platform that can scale with your business as well, or scale to expand beyond just your department if you’re looking for a gift platform. So, the ability to have that group structure, enterprise capabilities, and managing individual budgets. Make sure that the campaign that you choose has that granular ability to slot in with your own particular internal structures.
And finally, my advice is to look at the gifts with quantifiable impact. It makes a huge difference. Look for gifts that make a positive impact on the world. I don’t think I can emphasize that enough.
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About The Author
Ricardo Oliveira
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