Moonfare Referral Program
Context
Private Equity investment is a very closed niche and the power of the network is outstanding. HNWIs (High-Net-Worth-Individuals) typically rely on their close network to get recommendations on investment funds and asset classes that are worthwhile.
To leverage that, Moonfare launched, in its early years, a Referral program to incentivize investors to refer the platform and, as a reward, receive grants as Moonfare equity. The program showed good ROI but had severe scalability issues.
Since there's a limited pool of Virtual Stock Options (VSOPs) that the company could grant, we were tasked with the job to define a new program, which should provide a unique reward system. This project's scope was not to completely redesign its experience but rather to relaunch it with minimal changes to the code infrastructure and remove the Stock Options reward.
Team
Main stakeholders: VP of Marketing, Head of investing relationships
Me as Design lead
Research assistant
Project lead: Lead of Experiential Marketing
Product Manager - Registration team
Development team
Research
We have started the work relying on 2 pieces of research: A survey run before the current program was implemented and pulling data from foundational research done by the UXR team. From those, we learned the following:
What they expected from the program (wishlist):
Things they disliked:
The Plan
Alongside the Project Manager, and based on the research insights, I've worked on defining what the new rewards program would look like. We came up with some principles for it:
Helping others build their legacies
Being a meaningful part of Moonfare and helping it grow
Exclusivity
Transparency
Access and Community
Benefits, not incentives
Structure/program format, not scheme
Levels, not tiers
The tier-based system was the main change we proposed by creating a scenario where investors would be rewarded accordingly for the quality of their referrals. That would allow us to create a system where "soft rewards" such as taking part in events and exclusive information would provide good value and a better ROI.
Since we learned through a new survey (second round of research) that VSOPs were still a powerful tool to encourage referrals, we decided to keep it, but only for higher tiers (VIPs).
Final Result
We managed to rebrand the program, now called "The Investor's Club," and "reskin" the current implementation, adding the tiers logic to the backend.
The project took about 3 months to finalize, including pitching the new logic to high-level stakeholders (including the CEO). What we delivered:
Program renaming and rebrand with front end implementation
New tier-based reward system based on qualified referrals (referrals with actual investment vs. the referral with registrations only) with back end logic implementation
Complete CRM strategy for phasing out of old program and launch of new one
Improved user experience for referrals’ status (based on research insights)
With V1 implemented and ready to roll-out, I’ve handed-over the topic fully to the Sr. Product Designer who helped throughout the project. They’re researching further improvements to the referral experience and an the a program extension including affiliate links.
Tier logic, based on referrals with investments
Learnings
We managed to rebrand the program, now called "The Investor's Club," and "reskin" the current implementation, adding the tiers logic to the backend.
The project took about 3 months to finalize, including pitching the new logic to high-level stakeholders (including the CEO).
Avoid relying only on anecdotal evidence
We blindly trusted the old survey and the anecdotal evidence found in foundational research, which drove us throughout the first half of the project. Later, we decided to run another study, which brought contradictory data about investors' perceptions of financial rewards (including VSOPs).
Run your main hypotheses with all stakeholders and sponsors, multiple times if needed
The initial program was conceived by the CEO himself, so we took it for granted that he would be ok with the rationale of removing the grants as rewards (based purely on ROI calculations). He opposed it (after months of work) and explained why, with strong empirical evidence (as mentioned before, PE is a very closed niche), VSOPs were the ultimate reward for people who believe in the company vision. Therefore it was important to him to keep it.
