Designing a Block Editor for Nonprofit Storytelling

At Resilia, I was tasked with improving adoption of Resilia Stories, our impact reporting tool for nonprofits.

Annual reports are how nonprofits show their community what they’ve accomplished and ask funders for more support. But grassroots teams often lack the capacity or expertise to write strong reports, and research showed that existing tools either felt intimidating or focused only on visuals, with no help on what to actually say.

Stories had its own problem: low adoption. We suspected a frustrating editor and too few features built for impact reporting, so the project grew into two parts: a new annual report template, and an overhaul of the editor behind every story.

I started with past usability reports and a competitive analysis, then held five discovery calls with annual reporting experts to learn what makes a report effective and where nonprofits get stuck.

With our PM and engineering lead, I scoped the work into releases that would deliver value fastest, and I prototyped the full vision so leadership could see where each release was headed.

The editor came first. Users couldn’t figure out how to add blocks, so I added buttons to add blocks above and below that appear on hover. I also made text preview in place so that the whole page wouldn’t shift when editing text. And stories looked bland, so I made the blocks full-width with custom background colors, with text color adjusting automatically to keep contrast accessible.

Next, I designed two blocks modeled on professionally designed reports: a summary metric block for highlighting key numbers, and a text and image block to create more complex layouts.

Experts told us that readers jump to the sections they care about, and that printed copies still matter. So we added a table of contents generated from a report’s headings and a PDF export with formatting defined block by block.

Finally, everything came together in an annual report template that guides nonprofits on which sections to include and what to write in each, based directly on what the experts shared.

Since launch, nonprofits have started using the template to build their annual reports, and the editor improvements now power every story in the product.