12+

Initiatives​

4

Product teams

200+

Fortune 500 enterprise clients

$3.7B​

Annual giving ecosystem​

What is Benevity Grants

Benevity Grants (Grants Essentials) is a global enterprise platform for managing corporate grant programs end-to-end, designed to scale across regions, compliance requirements, and highly variable client workflows.

Versaic (Grants Advanced) is a legacy grants system built for deeply customized enterprise programs, supporting complex, multi-region workflows where flexibility and control outweigh standardization.
​
As a Design Lead across both, I operated at the system level—balancing scalable platform design with bespoke client needs, while supporting global compliance, nonprofit vetting, and cross-product alignment.

Challenge

• Benevity Grants Management (Essentials and Advanced) were misaligned with Benevity’s design system and product design standards.
• Grant reviewers experienced significant cognitive load at enterprise scale.
• Manual workflows, lack of self serve, and missing workflow visualization created delivery friction, long wait times, and client frustration.
• Fragmented analytics limited visibility into grant performance and impact for strategic funding decisions.
• Evidence infrastructure for decision-making was underdeveloped.

This environment created decision debt, delivery inefficiencies, and slowed innovation velocity, especially as the scope expanded.

My Role: ​Lead Product Designer

Operating at the portfolio level across four product teams, responsible for design strategy, systems, and AI-enabled workflow evolution.

Design Leadership Themes

Strategic principles that guided cross-platform investment and delivery decisions.

Friction Reduction

Every feature removed a critical bottleneck: support tickets, form abandonment, information gaps, data silos. Design as a force for operational efficiency.

Complexity to Simplicity

Self serve initiatives, modernized standards aligned to greater Benevity platform for experience cohesion, cross platform standards multiplied impact.

Business-Aware Design

Each design decision tied to business outcomes: support efficiency, user adoption, compliance, revenue justification. Design as strategic business lever.

Problems that Matter

Time to value, efficiency levers, and deeper understanding of diverse granting users increased adoption and long-term client retention.

What I Actually Built

Design Strategy & Capacity Leadership
Set the Grants design strategy and capacity-aware roadmap, sequencing 12+ initiatives across four teams. Established clearer intake and prioritization rhythms to shift the organization from reactive delivery to a systems-driven model.

Design Scaling & Alignment System
Modernized the Grants experience to improve accessibility and reduce compliance risk. Established reusable page patterns, AI interaction models, and component governance that scaled beyond Grants into the broader Benevity platform.

Platform & Self-Serve Enablement
Led high-impact self-serve initiatives that reduced manual workflows from weeks to minutes. Consolidated bespoke solutions into configurable patterns, improving transparency without proportional engineering cost.

Design QA & Governance
Embedded design QA as part of product process, strengthening accessibility, interaction quality, and accountability while reducing downstream rework.

AI Adoption & Evidence-Based Decision Infrastructure
Advanced responsible AI adoption to accelerate synthesis and decision loops. Reduced research cycles by 5–10× with AI tools like NotebookLM, Cursor, and ideation loops with replit. Applied OOUX to speed architecture alignment, and led our data strategy for better product analytics.

Note: Visuals are representative and anonymized. AI summaries are generally available. AI-assisted scoring was not broadly released at the time of this work. (2026-02-20)

AI-Assisted Decision Support

The need
Rising grant volume and complexity forced reviewers to spend 15 minutes to several hours per application, with some single person teams handling ~1,000 submissions per cycle for each granting program. The platform lacked scalable decision support, creating cognitive strain and inconsistent evaluation across high-stakes funding workflows.

Timeline
​October 2025 - January 2026
​
The outcome
I led design for AI scoring and AI summaries. AI Summaries which was recently released on the second week of March with a 30% adoption rate on the third week and 46% adoption by the fourth week shows just how much grant makers want to ease their burden of manual review. AI Scoring, a more complex and higher governance feature, would help in establishing the foundation for more consistent, scalable, and strategically focused grant decision-making.

Learn more about AI Summaries

Organizational Impact

1. Reduced churn and supported revenue-critical deals
2. Accelerated reviewer throughput at enterprise scale
3. Enabled staff reallocation through self-serve automation
4. Cut new-hire onboarding time from 3 months to 1 month
5. Standardized design quality across the Grants ecosystem
6. Operationalized human-in-the-loop AI governance

​Note: Impact statements reflect measured outcomes. Exact figures are confidential.

What Having Me Means

✨ Progress without compromising quality​ - Teams move faster with clear guardrails.
✨ Less debate, clearer defaults​ - Decisions rest on evidence and reusable systems.
✨ Reduced cognitive load​​ - Complex work becomes manageable and repeatable.
✨ AI as a leverage tool, not a distraction - Amplification, not replacement.
✨ ​Systems that continue working when I’m not in the room - The true mark of leverage.

What my team has to say

I have been fortunate to work closely with Anne as a content designer, and I’d recommend her without hesitation. Anne approaches content design as a true partner discipline, not a layer added at the end. On complex, content-heavy projects, she brought clarity, strong judgment, and solutions that scaled. Most recently she has turned her attention to AI to manage heavy workloads more effectively and to improve team practices.

Tamsin Douglas Senior Content Designer at Benevity

I worked closely with Anne as a Product Designer, and she is someone I would recommend without hesitation. Anne is extremely thoughtful and detail-oriented, with a strong ability to think through the entire product experience end to end. She identifies patterns and creates solutions that scale across features. Anne takes ownership, brings clarity to complex or ambiguous areas, and can be trusted to handle complex design problems with care and consistency.

Richa Senior Product Manager

I have had the privilege of directly reporting to Anne, and I can confidently say she is one of the best mentors I’ve had in my career. Her design approach is deeply strategic and insightful, going to the root of every problem to ensure solutions are meaningful and future-proof. She takes initiative, drives the right conversations, and pushes for what’s needed to make great design happen. Anne encourages those around her to push their boundaries and has been a true mentor who accelerates the growth of the people she works with.

Isha Paknikar UX Designer, GlobalLogic

Anne was always my go-to whenever product requirements or discovery weren’t clear. I always knew Anne would have a thoughtful answer, no matter how complex the user flow or experience was. Anne will be a huge asset wherever she goes next.

Ankita Singh Senior Staff Developer at Benevity

I’ve managed Anne directly and she consistently operates at a very high level, balancing deep execution with a strong grasp of the bigger picture. She is a steady and trusted partner in a complex space.

Anne has taken clear operational ownership for how design work gets delivered, coordinating contractors and delegating intentionally so the team could stay focused on the highest impact work.

She also actively raises the bar by exploring AI in practical ways and bringing concrete workflows back to the design group.

Shane Griffiths Product Design Leader at Benevity

Anne is very talented and deeply committed to constantly improving her skillset, expanding her knowledge, and trying new ideas. She is great at what she does today and will continue to grow even stronger over time.

Every time I work with her, I come away with a new experiment to try or a new book to read. Anne is someone who will expertly navigate the evolutions of her career.

Richard Jones, MSc Writer | Communications Specialist

AI & the Future — Human-Centered Adoption

I was an early internal advocate for practical AI adoption, embedding experimentation into everyday team workflows and improving throughput and decision confidence.

At UXDX 2025 in New York, I felt a shared tension across attendees... excitement paired with anxiety. What consistently helped was play. Treating AI as something to explore, rather than fear, made people more willing to engage with it. I saw the same pattern at Benevity: curiosity lowered resistance and helped adoption feel safer and more human.

Let's talk

You can send me an email at [email protected] if you're interested to learn more about me, or connect with me on LinkedIn.

Talk to Anne

Credits to Storyset for their vector illustrations that made this page look lot better.