Volunteer

Volunteer experience

I ran AIGA Austin’s Changemaker Series, a summer-long social impact program pairing volunteer creative teams with local nonprofits, for two years. Year 1 resulted in only a 33% project success rate. To improve project outcomes in year 2, my organizing team and I treated the program itself as a service design challenge and overhauled the volunteer experience.

My role

Program lead. Oversaw end-to-end experience of all participants. Co-designed and co-facilitated workshops. Wrote program materials. Oversaw the design or the brand identity.

Team

Led and, collaborated with, a multi-disciplinary organizing team of nine designers and non-designers.

Timeline

6 months

Discovery & research

Recognizing that volunteering is hard and social impact design is complex, we treated the low project success rate as a systemic design problem.

Though surveys, retrospectives, and 1 on 1 interviews, I learned more about the challenges the volunteer creative teams faced and pinpointed the critical areas where we needed to better support them.

The program's kickoff workshop did not do a good job of preparing teams for the project journey.

Internalized pressure to perform well caused interpersonal conflict and prevented teams from asking for help when they needed it.

If volunteers had questions, they didn’t know where to find answers. Many of the tools and information they needed were too scattered.

I used an as-is journey map to plot our findings. We used this to identify the breakdowns in the volunteer experience and the opportunities to improve it.

Strategy

I worked closely with my organizers and workshop facilitator to define and execute a strategy that addressed the points of friction we identified in our research.

Expectations: Establish new backend processes to ensure clear communication and reenforce expectations at every touchpoint. Volunteers should always know what they were doing, why they were doing it, how to do it, and where to find help.
Support: Build a strong network of advisors to provide ongoing guidance and support throughout the project journey. Don't forget to support the advisors too.
Education: Strengthen the design thinking curriculum and equip volunteers with the resources needed to navigate obstacles.

I used a to-be journey map to plot the redesigned experience. We knew we could reduce, but not completely eliminate, the stressors our volunteers faced in the course of the project. Instead, we baked in extra support at these points to minimize their impact.

We thoughtfully created support materials, like our volunteer handbook, for every program milestone to ensure volunteers had the right information, at the exactly right time. I wrote most of this content.

I collaborated with our design-thinking facilitator to strategically improve the curriculum of our Kickoff Workshop and give volunteers tools to better navigate the obstacles encountered the previous year. We used a service map to meticulously plan the back and front stages to ensure the workshop ran smoothly.

Our advisors coached teams through every milestone, starting with the kickoff workshop.

Results

Our efforts were successful. By the end of year 2, the project success rate was 100%. Our non-profit clients were enthusiastic about the results.

Stronger project outcomes

Armed with the right design tools, the projects were better researched, more strategic, and realistic to implement and maintain.

Increased confidence

All volunteers reported feeling confident in their team and their project which led to a notable reduction in interpersonal conflict. Teams quickly self-resolved issues with minimal interference from organizers.

Better client relationships

More confident volunteer teams resulted in more confident clients and stronger collaboration between the two.

One of our volunteers teams pose for a photo with their non-profit client, Black Mamas ATX.