Why Nonprofits Should Embrace Human-Centered Design

Let’s face it – when it comes to serving others, “optimization” and “automation” will only take you so far.

There are a thousand tools for increasing donations, sending pithy emails, and microtargeting followers and potential converts across social media and the web. But good tools will only take you so far – and to truly scale your organizational impact, you’ve got to go beyond big data and get off-screen (you can wait till you read the rest of this post…).

Think of human-centered design as a platform-agnostic toolkit that can help you scale your organizational impact. Whether you’re in the backyard or the board room, intentionally including the audiences you serve when developing program updates, service offerings, project roadmaps, or strategic plans, you’ll gain…

Elevating Your Brand through Typography

Why does typography matter?

Typography is often thought of as a designer’s obsession. We nerd out over things like tight kerning, seamless ligatures, and striking hierarchies. While it may sound technical, here are three reasons why typography (as well as font selection) matter to your organization and your audiences:

1. It helps to express your personality and voice as an organization.

Much like with verbal communication, it isn’t only about what you say that matters but also how you say it that greatly affects how information is digested. This is also applies to written and visual communication. Elements of typography such as the layout of your text as well as the fonts you use can all greatly affect this. Through the use of effective and mindful typography, you can better convey to your audience the voice and personality of your organization.

2. It helps build credibility and displays professionalism of your organization.

Whether you like it or not, people often deem the credibility and professionalism of companies and organizations based solely on appearances, even if they have had no prior knowledge or past engagements. As this is the case, typography often plays an important role in this. Your audience could easily mistaken poorly executed typography with an unwarranted lack of credibility of your organization. However, effectively used type can greatly boost your organization’s appearance which would in turn make it more credible and professional in the eyes of your audience.

3. It makes your content easier to understand for your audience.

As it is essential to be able to effectively communicate to your audience, typography can play a huge factor in this. Through typography, it can help to create a hierarchy of information, which would help in conveying what is important to you and your organization. Through hierarchy that’s created through typography, this helps to break down large bodies of text into smaller and easier to digest content. Through this, it ultimately allows for your organization to better convey who you are to your audience.

Don’t have a budget for typography? Here are some free resources to consider.

Whether you’re developing your new brand or looking to broaden your font collection, free fonts are a cost-effective way to add to your design toolbox—because they’re free! Since there are countless websites that offer free fonts, it can sometimes be an overwhelming search to find ones that are both high quality and on-brand. Why is it so difficult? Most free font websites don’t include licensing for their fonts (which gives you permission to use it legally) or offer a poor selection of fonts to choose from. To make browsing for free fonts easier, here are a couple of quality resources to check out! If there’s any other resources that you feel should also be mentioned, please post a comment below.

Dear Loved One: It’s Time We Talk

Love Letter / Breakup Letter

With Valentine’s Day around the corner (yes, those candy hearts can already be found on local shelves), we thought we’d share one of our favorite tools with you — Love Letter / Breakup Letter. Whether you’re struggling with donations or visibility, this simple tool can help elevate your brand, and create experiences that resonate and drive action. Download the facilitator’s guide and template and learn how to better connect with those you serve!

Improv Your Way to New Ideas

I recently watched David Letterman’s ‘My Next Guest is’ interview with Tina Fey — while the entire episode is worthy of your time, the clip below is the inspiration for this post. In it, Tina explains that one of the key rules of improv is “yes, and…”. Someone starts the scene with an idea or scenario and the next person agrees to it, and then builds upon it.

“Yes, and…” is also something we practice in design thinking. It pushes us to expand ideas and add onto them instead of saying, “No,” or “How about this instead?” When we can get beyond our own ideas and truly listen to others, that’s when the possibilities for innovation become limitless.

Tina further explains her rules of improv in the book “Bossypants.” She explains, “Now, obviously in real life you’re not always going to agree with everything everyone says. But the Rule of Agreement reminds you to “respect what your partner has created” and to at least start from an open-minded place. Start with a YES and see where that takes you.”

Another rule she shares is that there are no mistakes – only opportunities.

“If I start a scene as what I think is very clearly a cop riding a bicycle, but you think I am a hamster in a hamster wheel, guess what? Now I’m a hamster in a hamster wheel. I’m not going to stop everything to explain that it was really supposed to be a bike. Who knows? Maybe I’ll end up being a police hamster who’s been put on ‘hamster wheel’ duty because I’m ‘too much of a loose cannon’ in the field. In improv there are no mistakes, only beautiful happy accidents. And many of the world’s greatest discoveries have been by accident. I mean, look at the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup, or Botox.”

This is similar to one of our rules for ideation – there are no bad ideas. Keeping an open mind and deferring judgment allow us to explore avenues and take risks with our ideas.

So what could an improv-based exercise look like? Here’s how it might work:

Activity: Improv Your Way to New Ideas

Goal: Prototype

Time Frame: 2-5 minutes per idea explored

People: at least two people; a third person to document could be helpful

Materials Needed: video for recording (bonus)

Difficulty Level: Medium (role-playing might be better suited for certain personalities)

Step One: Choose the idea to prototype.

Step Two: The first person creates a scenario related to the idea. For example, if the idea is to build a mobile health clinic, the person might set up the scene to signify they’re taking their daughter to the clinic.

Step Three: Whatever the first person says, no matter how whacky, the second must agree to by following lead and then introducing a new element to the scene. Perhaps they’re a doctor onsite, or they bring life to the mobile clinic and assume a characterized version of it.

Step Four: The first person then responds, and continues to build the scene. With each element that’s added, new details about the mobile clinic will emerge, making room for collaborative iteration. Piecing the puzzle together, you should end up with detailed description of how your mobile health clinic will function, what it looks like, how visitors engage with it, and so on and so forth.

Stay tuned to hear how this exercise works for us, or drop us a note if you decide to try it yourself. Let’s be honest though, anything inspired by Liz Lemon has to be great, right?

Innovation Starts with Hello.

A common myth on the topic of innovation is that there’s just no time for it. It’s hard to get a group of people in a room, with clear minds, to really focus and come up with the next idea. Other deadlines wait, schedules are packed, and we’re all just too busy to get to that visionary state of mind.

While all of that may actually be true – the real problem lies in the notion that innovation will happen from the inside out. Sure there are internal drivers that can help you achieve innovation – curiosity, a fail-first mentality, perhaps even obsession. But even with these things in place, the best ideas aren’t created when groups of people sit around and think. The best ideas come from actively engaging with and talking to those you serve. Innovation starts with Hello.

Starting conversations and working directly with your audiences is how you will uncover new insights. Until you truly know the way your audience interacts with your product or service, and perhaps more importantly, the motivations behind those interactions, it’s nearly impossible for you to continuously grow and improve.

This is why we practice human-centered design at SmallBox. With a commitment to design research – a type of research rooted in empathizing with real people and understanding their unique environments and contexts – we are constantly striving to keep the end-user at the core of all solutions and ideas. We co-design alongside them, test and iterate directly with them, and ultimately work to ensure the final outcome is truly something that will serve them.

When was the last time you spoke directly to a customer?

Here are three methods we commonly use to spark conversations, ideas, and opportunities:

Interviews: while one of the more common methods used for audience research, an interview can make or break your research based on your preparation and approach. Check out our how-to for conducting a successful interview.
Diary Study: this design research method allows you to collect input from audiences over a set period of time. It’s particularly useful if you’re working in a sensitive problem space or are logistically unable to speak directly to your audiences. Create a series of workbook pages, filled with questions, prompts, and space for the unknown.
Observation: Whether your offering is a service or a product, observing the way your audiences engage or interact with it can generate insights and additional questions you didn’t even know to ask. Be sure to conduct the study in user’s natural environment, and follow the A-E-I-O-U framework for documentation.

Once you have selected your research method(s), take a look at our suggested mindsets to help ensure a successful conversation!

Improve Board Orientation by Applying Design Thinking

Since SmallBox has been introducing nonprofits to a creative problem-solving methodology called Design Thinking, we often find that people think the creative framework is intimidating. But as we work with people and they learn about the Design Thinking process, they want to apply it to all their problems.

We are here to tell you it’s okay to be intimidated, and it’s okay to be excited. What you need to know is that Design Thinking shouldn’t be studied and put on the shelf, it requires that you take action and apply it. Even if it’s using one simple tool that you think can get to better insights for your team or outcomes for those you serve. We say commit to Design Doing (not just thinking)!

Let’s put the theory into practice and show you how you can apply a design thinking method to an ongoing nonprofit challenge: new board member on-boarding [aka orientation].

Tool: Journey mapping

In this exercise, the bigger your map, the better. Map the current new board member on-boarding process in a linear fashion on a big piece of butcher paper or a large white board. Flatten the process by mapping it in an order that makes sense, chronological typically works well. This means you need to create a beginning and an end of the on-boarding process.

As you are gathering insights about the current process in this exercise, it’s worth including as many informed stakeholders as possible. This may include new and former board members, staff, and anyone who has prepped, planned or experienced the current on-boarding process. What’s key to remember is that you are working to improve the process for the new board member, not for your nonprofit. Always keep the board member’s experience as the focus of your work.

Use colored Post-It notes to capture steps of the process and apply to the journey map. Post-Its create a visual aspect to the work that accesses the right brain, and allows you to change or add elements to the order of the process when needed. When completed you will have a visual diagram of all the touch points your new board members have during on-boarding.

Once you have mapped the current process, determine which parts of it delight new board members and which parts need improvement or confuse new board members. Ideally, you will ask board members who went through the process what their experience was. Where did they experience high points and low points? Highs and lows in the journey map can be identified using plus and minus symbols or any other creative way your team comes up with.

Once you have assembled all of your touch points and on-boarding highs and lows, you can start to assemble a list of what to capitalize on and what to improve.

Tool: oil change

This tool can be used in various settings, and we suggest applying it to the items on your journey map. This is a simple and quick tool aimed at creating efficient and participatory conversations about what people see in the journey map. It involves a group leader or facilitator asking a series of questions. Here are the ones we like to use:

Based on what you see on the journey map, what’s working?
Based on what you see on the journey map, what’s not working?
What’s missing from our board on-boarding journey?
What else?

The last two are purposely open-ended to encourage team members to bring new ideas forward to the group. We find that often when people start looking at on-boarding (or any journey) differently, it ignites creative ideas that deserve to be captured.

Once you have these questions answered, you can choose any number of voting methods to prioritize your areas of action and focus.

As Design Thinking gains more attention, we will continue to share our process so you can apply it with to the work you lead.

This article originally published on September 12, 2017, Charitable Advisors weekly newsletter.

Jenny Banner has been practicing amateur psychology since middle school. This interest in what makes people tick, led Jenny to careers sales, HR, and consulting as well as a graduate education in I/O Psychology (the psychology of the workplace). In her 15+ years of HR and consulting experience, Banner has worked with companies from Fortune 500 to start-ups, and observed similarities. As a consultant and coach her focus has been on leadership development, career transition, and training. She joined Smallbox as director of strategic initiatives and is applying her unique skill set to help organizations align their internal and external brand perceptions, and is working to refine educational offerings around problem solving using Design Thinking.

eX Summit – Mapping an Employee Experience

When we go to a conference there are some of us who want to leave inspired and some of us who want to leave with practical tools we can apply in our workplaces. In our session in early August at the eX Summit, we catered to the latter group.

We hosted an interactive one-hour workshop that introduced the concept of proto-personas and journey mapping in the context of creating employee experiences. Traditionally, these tools have been used by marketers when discussing customer experiences. We want to make sure that in addition to paying attention to your customers, you’re taking conscious care of your employees.

Here are the highlights of what we covered:
Three categories to consider when thinking about employee experiences are:

Culture – They way things get done, how people treat each other, communication between departments
Technology – How is your technology helping or hindering employees?
Environment – What is your physical space like, and what does it inspire?

Examining and changing employee experiences doesn’t always have a hard cost associated with it.

Tools to use when considering employee experiences:

Proto-Persona: An adapted version of a research-based persona created using secondary research and educated guessing. Typically includes: Demographics, Behaviors, Needs, and Goals. Walking these proto-personas through your employee experiences can provide new insights.
Journey Map: This tool creates a sequential and flat version of an employee experience. In our session we created a journey map for a new hire’s first day from their first hour to their last. We explored what actions a new hire takes, what technology and people they interact with, and what their resulting thoughts and feelings are. Using all of this information, we identified high and low points of a person’s first day. Seeing an experience in this visual way allowed participants to identify pain points and gain points of the experience.

If you missed us at the eX Summit and are interested in learning more about these tools, we are here to help! We are actively looking for opportunities to share these tools with HR and recruiting teams. Look for more workshop opportunities at Smallbox in the upcoming months or feel free to host us at your company.

A Wall You’re Allowed To Write On

Entering a design research project can be intimidating – heck, sometimes it’s even tough to talk to a new coworker, not to mention interviewing and gathering data from hundreds, even thousands, of new faces. Graffiti walls can be a simple, open way of gathering input from diverse audiences – and are efficient. Once you’ve set up your graffiti wall, it’s not time-intensive to monitor or collect responses.

What Are Graffiti Walls?

A design research method, graffiti walls have three parts:

a prompt (usually a single question),
a large-scale canvas (banner paper, chalkboard, bulletin board with notecards or sticky notes, etc.)
and writing materials (feel free to use color to encourage creativity!) for responses.

These materials are then placed in a common area where your audiences can interact with them. Graffiti walls gather qualitative data – i.e. words, shared language, creative responses that are descriptive in nature, and not numerical.

When Graffiti Walls Are Useful

Consider the audience you are trying to gather information from when deciding to use graffiti walls. Would your audience(s) be comfortable talking to a researcher? If not, a graffiti wall can provide an open forum for them to still be a valuable contributor.

Do time, space, or other constraints prevent easy access to your audience(s)? If so, graffiti walls can provide an accessible space to contribute over a sustained period of time.

Is language a key focus of your design research project (such as branding, organizational mission, vision, and values, etc.)? If so, graffiti walls can cast a wide net for gathering lots of language from a large group of contributors.

When…They Aren’t

Graffiti walls shouldn’t be considered the end-all, be-all method for collecting qualitative research from your audiences. If you’re trying to accomplish one of the below objectives, you should utilize a different design research method:

You need to hear from specific individuals. Graffiti walls are (typically) anonymous in nature, and don’t force participation. If you absolutely need to attribute input from a specific individual, a more focused, individual method should be used.
Your audience’s responses require context or expansion. Graffiti wall submissions are best as short, descriptive words and phrases. If your audience will want to explain their answer at length, consider interviews, surveys, or other methods that encourage expansive input.
You need quantitative data. If your research question needs to provide you with numbers, it’s best to stay away from graffiti walls – which, because of their open nature, should not be relied upon to score audience perception, satisfaction, or other metrics.

Reinventing Your Customer Experience

When it comes to the experiences your organization delivers, “good enough” is no longer an acceptable standard. Your customers – donors, members, patients, and even employees – are being actively courted by other organizations for their loyalty and support.

Customer experience (CX)—it’s a concept that’s having a moment in the spotlight. But what does it mean and what’s the best way to deliver it?

Put simply, CX encompasses all interactions with and aspects of a brand. Products, services (online or off) are all part of a cumulative customer experience. And by customers, we mean any audience that a brand serves: buyers, subscribers, students, donors, members, even employees. In today’s world, one experience that falls short can impact brand perception, so how can you ensure your CX is up to snuff?

Step one is to better understand the current experience.

The rest of this post will walk you through a few tools we often use in customer experience design. To bring these exercises to life, we’re going to use a mock example from an organization we’ve named FitCo. FitCo is a professional association for fitness trainers. They help members connect with one another, and provide access to new research, trends, tips and other professional development opportunities.

Step 1 – Identifying Your Customers

To begin, we must try to empathize with your audiences. Our first exercise focuses on building audience personas. A persona is essentially a profile of your average audience member. For CX purposes, you may even need to create multiple personas. Focus on their challenges, goals, feelings, thoughts, and actions. Sometimes demographics are useful but understanding the emotional attributes of your audiences is most critical.

Download this persona example here.

Step 2 – Map Your Current Customer Journey

Journey mapping looks at your audiences’ experiences with your brand holistically. By mapping out the audiences’ journeys from beginning to end, you may find that there are some glaring pain points, or perhaps simple opportunities to create consistent and engaging interactions.

Full journey map example here.

Your journey map may be more or less complicated than this example. You may decide that your team would benefit from a digitized version, or that butcher paper and sticky notes will suffice.

After completing the mapping activity, it’s critical to document and prioritize pain points and opportunities. Doing so at this juncture will make the next phase of work clearer.

Opportunities & paint points example here.

Step 3 – Create a Game Plan

Now it’s time to put your understanding of CX to the test by creating a game plan. Gather your collaborators and decision makers to set some actionable goals, to create a timeline and then dive in.

There are a few key tips to keep in mind:

KEEP LISTENING

Never stop empathizing! Contintue to gather qualitative and quantitative feedback from audiences as you tackle challenges and build solutions. Focus on the areas of improvement you have identified, but also listen for new opportunities. Here is one way to accomplish that:

Do some quick audience polling using your social media account.
Implement a HotJar survey on your website.
Ask respondents to polls and surveys if they’d be willing to do a follow-up phone interview.
Reach out personally to your audiences—involve your team members to reach out to your customers, donors, students, patients, or members.

COLLABORATE

Create a task force or committee and arm them with your customer experience research and creative problem-solving methodologies. Bonus points for using the design thinking framework to problem solve.

MEASURE

Define metrics as they relate to your overall goals. Consider these questions:

What’s your baseline?
What are you looking to increase or decrease?
How often will you measure?

It may feel overwhelming at first but clearly outlining and accomplishing these steps can get your team get started.

All of the exercises are also scalable based on time and resources available so give it a try to see what can work for you! At SmallBox, we urge both nonprofit organizations and businesses to utilize these tools to analyze and, ultimately, improve their customers’ experiences. By understanding your audiences and the interactions they share with your brand, you can design a distinctive experience that increases engagement and ensures retention.

Interested in learning more? Download the SmallBox Customer Experience Design Kit for a supplemental guide on the following exercises.

Setting the Foundation for Employee Engagement

Employee engagement was pegged as the top HR trend for 2017, and we’re almost a month into Q2. Hopefully by now you’ve installed the kegerator, had a company picnic and set up the foosball table—and viola, employees engaged! Unfortunately, it’s not so simple. Most often, we find that there are deeper foundational needs to address in order to foster a healthy, engaging team culture.

To create a transformative and engaging employee experience, we need to think more strategically. In the rest of this post, I’ll cover objectives to work toward with your team, and activities that can help jumpstart progress.

The challenge: foundational dysfunction

Does your team struggle with conflict or accountability? How about core values? It’s easy to bypass underlying organizational needs such as clarity around core values, or a team-wide dysfunction like a fear of conflict. It may seem hard to address, but it’s even harder for people to feel invested if the basics like trust, accountability, commitment, aren’t in place.

Objective: Establish organizational values
Activity: Mountains and Valleys exercise

Gather a group of stakeholders and employees that are representative of the company, and ask the group to collaboratively tell the story of the company, or an amount of time leading up to the present. Focus on important highs (mountains) and lows (valleys) that affected the team. Bring in a trusted employee or third-party facilitator to guide the conversation, asking questions that dig deeper.

While listening, write down words from each mountain and valley—from feelings and emotions to themes and other terms. After reaching the present, take a break, then reconvene to discuss the highlighted words or themes. Have the team identify the ones that resonate most with them. What you’re left with is the start of your core values, extracted from your unique team and story. By giving team members a chance to participate, the team will feel more invested in these values, making them more likely to stick.

You can find a more in-depth guide to the Mountains and Valleys core values exercise via Culture Sync.

Oil change stickies.

Objective: Improve candor, address fear of conflict
Activity: Read “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team”—as a team

Addressing dysfunction is a major challenge, which is why companies and teams hesitate to do it. But as Patrick Lencioni, author of “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team” states, “the causes of dysfunction are both identifiable and curable.”

Teams that are willing to address common causes of dysfunction can better align around common objectives, make higher quality decisions, and retain star employees. Lencioni crafted this book as a “business fable,” making it easy to read and digest in a matter of hours. It also includes a team assessment, which allows individuals to self-assess their contribution to dysfunction, creating awareness of current roadblocks and behavioral solutions.

Objective: Gauge the team’s temperature & monitor progress
Activity: Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS)

The Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS) survey focuses on gauging employee engagement and loyalty by asking the question, “How likely is it that you would recommend your employer to a friend or acquaintance?” The eNPS is useful for setting a baseline that will help determine if your culture is growing and improving over time. It can also help prioritize areas of focus.

Team voting on language.

Hop to it!

Once you have a culture baseline and understanding of what your team desires, set some realistic and attainable goals such as increasing internal communication, giving accolades when core values are demonstrated, and even something as simple as stopping to celebrate wins.

These activities are just a few of many that can help get your organization on its way to an engaging employee experience. What are some of your favorite team or culture-focused activities?