PayPal Giving Hub
Redesigning charitable giving for millions of PayPal customers.
Replace with your strongest Giving Hub screenshot. Ideally the returning-donor state showing a favorite charity, Support Again section, and personalized endorsements.
Giving was an afterthought. We changed that.
Before 2020, PayPal had millions of potential donors and a giving experience buried three taps deep in a hamburger menu. The charity directory showed a logo and a name — nothing more. It wasn't inspiring anyone to give.
When PayPal's Consumer Design organization greenlit a full app redesign (internally called Digital Wallet), our team saw the opening to finally give giving a real home. I joined the project in April 2020 and led the design for the new Giving Hub — a personalized, discovery-driven experience built into the heart of the app.
I was promoted from UX Designer to Senior UX Designer over the course of this project. My designs were selected over a parallel effort, and I went on to present to the Head of Consumer Design, Director of Design, and Director of Consumer Product, and to represent Giving in the cross-functional alignment workshops that shaped the broader Digital Wallet experience.
The sparse charity list in the old PayPal app — just logo + name, reached through the hamburger menu. Annotate to show how buried it was.
The Home Page module with Giving section visible, and/or the Send screen showing Person / Business / Charity options. Two prominent entry points replacing one buried menu item.
Why would you donate to a charity you know nothing about?
That was the core issue. The old experience asked customers to make a financial decision based on a logo and a name. For the American Red Cross or St. Jude, that's enough. For the thousands of smaller organizations on our platform, it isn't.
Our research told a consistent story across three themes:
Donors needed real information — mission, imagery, legitimacy signals — before they'd commit to an unfamiliar charity. They were leaving the app to research on their own.
Repeat giving was common, but the experience didn't support it. There was no easy way to return to a charity you'd previously donated to.
Donors wanted to see that their contributions made a difference — some connection between giving and outcome.
These needs came from existing donor research: surveys, usability sessions on other giving products, and industry benchmarking. They became the foundation for every design decision we made.
Charity profiles: giving donors a reason to care
PayPal has a nonprofit arm — the PayPal Giving Fund (PPGF) — which vets and enrolls charities on the platform. PPGF-enrolled charities can provide rich profile data: logos, header images, category tags, mission descriptions, and more. We had all of this in our systems. We just weren't surfacing any of it.
Working with the broader Consumer Design org — which was simultaneously building profile templates for merchants and users — I developed a charity profile page that made use of everything we had. The design included a header image (or a category-colored background with a white logo overlay if no image was provided), the charity's name, logo, and up to three category tags, an EIN number as a 501(c)(3) legitimacy signal, a link to the charity's own website, a Set Favorite button, a full mission description in the charity's own words, and a Donate button anchored at the bottom.
Every element had a reason. The EIN was about trust. The Set Favorite was about continuity. The header image and mission description were about emotional connection. Nothing was decorative.
Full charity profile screenshot. Annotate: header image, logo/categories, EIN number (trust), Set Favorite (continuity), mission description, Donate button.
Small, medium, and large card sizes. Show the merchant card contrast (Best Buy example) vs. the charity solution: category-colored backgrounds with white circle logo overlay. Tell the story of why illustrations were dropped.
The Giving Hub: one destination, three types of content
The Hub wasn't just a charity directory. It would bring together PPGF-registered charities, PayPal Fundraisers (a new crowdfunding product), and PayPal Campaigns — time-bound initiatives for disaster relief and major causes. One place to find any type of giving opportunity.
The design challenge was personalization: how do you make the Hub feel relevant to someone with no history on the platform, and equally relevant to a donor who's been giving through PayPal for years?
For new users
With no personal data, we started with smart editorial defaults. An onboarding prompt surfaced actions to take: set a favorite, explore fundraisers, browse by category. Below that, featured charities gave first-time visitors a familiar starting point. Topical category sections shifted with the calendar — environmental charities around Earth Day, Black-led organizations during Black History Month.
For returning donors
As we learned more about a customer (through donation history, favorites, category engagement, and location if opted in) the Hub adapted. A set favorite appeared at the top — because setting a favorite is an intentional act. A Support Again section surfaced previous charities; past behavior is the strongest signal we have. Category endorsements, geo-located organizations, and timely PayPal Campaigns filled in the rest.
Editorial defaults: featured charities, category sections, browse. No personal data yet.
Favorite charity at top, Support Again section, personalized category endorsements.
Fully adaptive feed with geo-located charities, active campaigns, and personalized discovery.
Our vision was a fully dynamic feed reordering itself in real time. At launch, the technical infrastructure wasn't there. Rather than dilute the vision or wait indefinitely, we prioritized the section order manually — from most personal to least. The result felt personalized and intentional to the user; we just orchestrated it editorially instead of algorithmically. Knowing when to approximate a vision without abandoning it shaped how we approached this whole project.
Building shared patterns across the platform
Some of the work I'm most proud of happened outside the Giving Hub itself. I represented Giving in the cross-functional alignment workshops where Consumer Design, Shopping, P2P, and the PayPalUI design system team worked out shared components. The charity profile template I contributed became the foundation for merchant and user profiles across the entire app.
One specific example: suggested donation amounts. I worked with PayPalUI to define how preset giving tiers would work across all giving contexts on the platform — hierarchy, behavior, visual treatment — in a way flexible enough to live in any giving flow. There were also more complex challenges, like how to surface the PayPal Giving Fund relationship clearly without undermining the donor's emotional connection to the charity they chose.
Donation payment flow showing preset giving tiers + custom input. If you have the PPGF disclosure version ("Donate to PayPal Giving Fund" with tooltip), include that too — strong story about balancing legal + UX constraints.
The charity card component as it appeared in the PayPalUI design system — or a side-by-side showing the pattern in two different giving contexts. Demonstrates contribution beyond your own product.
The biggest lever was simply making giving visible.
Moving from a buried hamburger menu item to two first-class entry points changed everything. The results reflected not just design quality, but what happens when a product finally gets the attention it deserves.
What I'd take forward
The Giving Hub taught me that the most impactful design work isn't always about the interface. The old giving experience wasn't bad because it was designed poorly; it was invisible because nobody had made the case for it to be anything more. Getting a seat at the table for the Digital Wallet redesign, and making the most of that opportunity, is what I'm most proud of here.
The decision to manually prioritize the Hub's sections rather than wait for algorithmic personalization was a small but important one. It let us ship something that felt thoughtful and tailored from day one. Knowing when good enough now is better than perfect later is something I try to carry into every project.
Throughout this project I worked closely with content designers, product managers, and engineering — holding the design vision together across all of those partnerships while keeping the user's needs at the center.