Time to think
outside the box.
General Mills chose us to help reinvent its blockbuster educational fundraising program.
For more than 20 years, American shoppers have diligently clipped the corners of boxes marked with the Box Tops for Education seal and sent them along to local elementary schools, raising more than $400 million for teachers and PTAs in the process. But with that massive success comes massive operating overhead, and by 2018 the whole idea of mailing paper had come to feel like a stale anachronism. After partnering with General Mills on the Betty Crocker Cookbook app and mobile enhancements to the legacy Box Tops program, the food giant pulled us in to help rethink the program from soup to nuts and design a completely new—and completely paperless—consumer experience.
Our contributions
Vision & Strategy
- Brand Strategy
- Product Strategy & Vision
- Concepting & Prototypes
Product Management
- Product Ownership
- Roadmapping
- Project Management
Product Design
- User Research
- Native Mobile Design
- Illustration
- Motion Design
Development
- iOS
- Android
- Front End
Less paper, more cash.
A program like Box Tops requires a ton of behind-the-scenes effort to pull off. From the volunteer coordinators who count, bundle, and mail each school's haul, to the auditors who comb through quarterly submissions to weed out expired clips, to the accountants who project the financial liabilities for each participating brand, Box Tops' deep ties to the physical world create lots of costs and complexity for everyone involved. We sought to reimagine the program for the modern technological landscape and find ways to weed out unscalable overhead, creating less risk for brands, driving more participation, and ultimately putting more cash in each school's account.
Smile for the camera.
We worked closely with General Mills' receipt data partner, Blink, to extend the capabilities of their OCR technology and create a first-class user experience by allowing technology to follow design, not the other way around. Receipt data is parsed and ingested in real time and rich, delight-inspiring visual feedback is provided to the user immediately as earnings are identified.
Multi-language support for every household.
Box Tops for Education is a nationwide program that helps parents and teachers across the country earn cash for their schools. As such, it was important for the mobile app to reflect this and accommodate bilingual households. That's why we leveraged localization and device-level language settings to fully automate the Box Tops system to display the desired language, whether English or Spanish, at the flip of a switch.
I'm going through withdrawal not getting to see your team this week!
Share the love and users will follow.
The new, paperless Box Tops program works differently than the original, and schools are the ones who lose out if people don't adapt to the digital experience. We introduced an incentivized referral program to give users the power to invite friends to Box Tops from inside the app. We saw a drastic uptick in users—and user quality—while driving down new user acquisition costs immensely. Thanks to the new Box Tops referral program, General Mills was able to save $10 per user compared to the paid media tactics they were using previously.
Validation is key.
Throughout our long standing partnership with General Mills, we've put emphasis on usability testing and conduct user interviews on a regular basis with vetted Box Tops users, non-users, and school coordinators. These exercises are performed during the design exploration phase—before any development work has begun—allowing us to validate unique design decisions and course-correct when necessary, ultimately creating a custom-made solution before launching a new, major feature.
Power to the user.
In order to stay on top of user satisfaction and keep the Box Tops experience fresh and exciting, we often utilize A/B testing for more intimate enhancements. By randomly generating which feature version a user experiences in the app, we are able to compare performance rates against desired outcomes, while the user navigates around the app naturally without interruption.
Build better experiences using data, automation, and generative AI.
Livefront is the preferred digital partner for some of the largest brands in the world. We bring world class talent and inspiration for moments that matter, helping organizations strategically introduce AI where it adds real value—to either improve the way digital products are built or to enhance the products themselves.