By Ori Amiel
Vince Greenfield is what many would call a jack of all trades. As the sole developer of the Storyraise report builder, he has utilized his graphic design and product engineering skills to create and enhance the product.
For Vince, functionality and usability are key aspects of the report builder, and because of that, his work has enabled hundreds of nonprofits to create reports that tell their stories.
With over 15 years of experience in both creative and technical work, Vince has seen quite a bit, and has plenty of valuable insights in regards to the future of his work, and the Storyraise product in particular. In the following interview, Vince talks about overcoming challenges and how he will continue to perfect the product as other factors come into play.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
You have two very distinct skillsets: product development and graphic design. How did your expertise in both of these fields help you create the Storyraise report builder?
From the development side, my experience with technologies like Google Cloud and Firebase have helped me build a strong and reliable back end. And because of that, our platform is powerful and can grow with users’ needs and whatever else they might throw at us.
On the design side, I focus on making the platform intuitive and more visually appealing. This means thinking about every aspect of the user experience, from layout and navigation to overall look and feel. Having both sides of the brain on that has really shaped me to have a better understanding of the product overall and allowed me to be able to shape it in the way that works for our customers.
What sets the Storyraise report builder apart from other platforms?
Storyriase is specifically tailored to nonprofits, which is completely different from the offerings that you’ll get with Canva or Adobe or Figma or something of that nature. While those tools are great for general design work, we integrate storytelling and fundraising features designed to specifically help nonprofits connect with their donors more effectively.
Additionally, we offer customizable templates and tools that are specifically geared towards impactful and mission-driven content, while keeping the learning curve pretty low as far as understanding the overall product and telling their unique stories.
Nonprofits have very specific needs. Many are stressed by budgets. They also have unique storytelling needs for their donors. All of those things make it more of a challenge, in a way, to produce a product that works well for them. But that’s exactly why they need one. They need something that’s built just for them.
How can Storyraise continue to integrate AI without sacrificing the human element?
This is a new and exciting challenge for us. Two of the AI models we use are OpenAI and Stable Diffusion, and those are specifically for AI-driven content generation.
We wanted to create a tool that was built for both designers and non-designers. As a designer myself, one thing I look for in a tool is a vast array of options where you can really fine tune and control your design. However, this can be overwhelming and challenging for someone who’s a non-designer. This is where AI comes into place.
With our tool, we’ve introduced micro experiences along the way, which allows the tool to think like a designer for users. That way, users don’t have to think about things like color theory or typography, but they can lean on a tool to help them along the way.
Looking ahead, what features do you want to add to Storyraise?
I constantly think about the trajectory of the Storyraise product and where we’re going. I like to think that the future is really open, and that things can and will unfold along the way. The immediate thing that I’m excited about is our plan to add more customizable templates and enhance analytics that help nonprofits better understand their campaign and performance.
Specifically regarding the templates, I’m really excited. We’re leveraging some generative AI capabilities to expand the number of design options that we have in the platform. In a way, we’re breaking design down into its core elements of typography, color and iconography and then using generative AI to build some quality pairings to make those templates appear polished and resonate with readers.
By making that process and overall output much smoother, we’ll have the ability to distribute our report creations to multiple devices. As of right now, we serve three device types in addition to PDFs. I think that we’ll be able to have content expanded into images and videos later on down the line, among the other things that will be really exciting to produce, especially with generative AI.