Sprint - Communication Activities
The global product team at Compassion found that the burden of writing to a sponsor was weighing heavily on the children in the program without giving anything in return. Most sponsors don’t write back anymore, so letter writing not only took valuable time from developmental activities, it also created disappointment.
My team facilitated a design sprint for a team in Bolivia to discover an activity that would generate communication, but was developmentally beneficial and enjoyable for the children, and didn’t rely on a response from a sponsor.
In our research we learned that for our Bolivian participants, healthy self-identity was the most crucial development category we needed to focus on. We uncovered that a mentorship relationship acts as a significant catalyst for growth in that area, but tutors are 1 to 20+ children, and such bonds are rare. So we settled on the concept of a mentorship relationship between alumni and current participants in the program. Monthly activities for mentors and participants would generate a communication regarding the participants progress and mentorship to the sponsor. This would alleviate the lack of tutors, eliminate the need for a sponsor to respond for a participant to get that sense of support and security, and tie alumni back into the program furthering a sense of ongoing community after graduation.
Background
Client Background:
The Global Product team manages the communication product coming out of the relationship between a sponsor and a participant in the Compassion Program. The success of this product heavily impacts retention rates and net promoter scores.
Problem:
Letter writing has been the traditional method of communication between a sponsor and participant, however this style of interaction has fallen off as quick-touch communication like texting has grown. Without Sponsors responding, writing a letter turned into a burden participants needed to carry in order to “prove” Compassion’s success to a sponsor. It takes valuable time away from participants of the program who could be learning key skills instead of writing a long letter to an individual who may never respond.
So we set out to create an activity that would be beneficial to the participants, while generating a communication for Sponsors.
My Role:
My primary role on the sprint was to prototype, but I was also in training to lead a sprint, so I co-led for the week, helping craft interview questions, facilitate interviews and keep tasks moving when my manager had a meeting. On the 3rd day of the sprint my manager became ill, so I stepped in and led for the last day and a half.
Research and Discovery
While we had research efforts exploring supporter needs, and previous research projects to springboard from, for this sprint we wanted to learn directly from our field staff and former participants, so our team went to Bolivia, while another went to Uganda. Power imbalance can completely destroy a research project, so the key decision makers and most experts were from Bolivia.
We spent the first day in team-bonding, learning a little about each others cultures, stumbling through introductions and adjusting to using a translator. I wouldn’t trade that first day for the world. Never underestimate the power imbalance of being a visitor, a guest and be sure to ask many questions and set a tone of complete humility before proceeding with an international research project. You need your in-country experts to set into their power if you are going to learn anything.
Expert & Potential User Interviews:
On day two we began our official design sprint with discovery interviews with alumni from the local program, alongside tutors and facilitators.
We had 5 KPI categories we needed to choose from before determining our final solution, so during these interviews we needed to learn which category to focus on, and we needed to learn any key struggles or highlights in the existing communication process.
Some Key Insights:
KPI Category was identified:
Healthy Self Identity was the primary category valued by all participants.
Main Influencers were identified:
Tutors
Friends
Low or Non Influencers were identified:
Family: Participants rarely communicate with family.
Sponsors: Were rarely mentioned by participants.
Insights:
Strong community & relationships were attributed with a high positive impact on healthy self-identity.
Friends & Tutors are the target users primary source of community.
Graduated Participants deeply miss the project.
A 1:1 connection with an involved, encouraging tutor was a dramatic catalyst for healthy self-identity.
Most Tutors do not have enough time for a 1:1 connection.
Design Process - Day 1:
During the interviews, notes were taken in “How might we” (“Como sería”) format during the interviews, grouped into categories and refined into a single final “How might we” sentence to guide the rest of the sprint. Based on this sentence we crafted a goal and set of metrics and potential risks.
How might we:
How might we encourage youth participating in vocational training so they can be mentors for younger participants?
Sprint Goals:
Supporters are delighted to see older youth developing as leaders and mentors
Younger participants have more agency in choosing vocational training and education they want to focus on.
Metrics:
Younger participants are 10% more satisfied with the support they have from the project through the new community with older age participants
At time of exit/completion of program, the number of participants who have vocational training or superior education has grown 50% within 3 years.
Sponsors are 10% more satisfied in surveys about the development of their sponsored youth and 20% more about their impact in the community.
Sprint Goals:
Will tutors and FCP staff be able to support the education or vocational training participants want to pursue?
Will older youth be willing to invest time to mentor?
Will sponsors be able to notice this change and give enough support to help their participants?
Prototype:
Our full concept was not a simple digital experience that we could test easily. If we had had weeks to prep for a test day we could have recruited both young participants and alumni to interact during a mentorship style activity, take pictures with captions for sponsors and then gauge response in both participants and alumni. Instead, we only had the ability to test with alumni. We had identified a risk that alumni may not be motivated to mentor and may have limited time even if they had the desire to mentor. So we needed to prototype an experience of sorts. We had different digital tools ideas to support that experience and generate communications to sponsors, but the tools and ideas were pointless if the concept of mentorship wasn’t clear and felt.
So I prototyped a fake “training” day of sorts where alumni would learn about being a mentor, what that commitment could look like, and gauge their interest. They would be presented with different “benefits” of being a mentor to help us determine which might be the most motivating to gain interest and what key features would make a good MLP.
Key Feature: Trainings & Progress Tracking
When test participants arrived they would walk through a digital manual training them as mentors, with progress indicators and celebrations of milestones. We would note what sort of questions were asked, how they felt after completing the training and who (if anyone) they would choose to share their progress with.
Design Process - Day 2:
We actually ran over on our first day, with translation of both the board and verbal communication proving to be quite time consuming, and so on day 2 we finished up risks and metrics.
Then, after establishing our basic guidelines for design, we moved into lightning demos, pulling inspiration from established tools and organizations. Each individual got 3 minutes to share tool, site or organization they found inspiring and why, with links for everyone else to follow along.
Design Process - Day 3:
While design sprints are intended to be quick-twitch, gut-based decision making, we found the lag in communication due to translation also sparked more conversation, second-guessing and deliberation because these quick decisions were harder to move past. We found there is a blurred line in the difference between a translation issue and a clarifying question that leads to more discussion. So while day 3 was supposed to be largely prototyping, we instead had to focus our time wrapping up design ideas and mapping a service blueprint of sorts.
In order to cut some of the extra conversation happening between translations, during day 3 I had everyone get out of their chairs. Miro had been our white boarding tool of choice to make translation a bit easier because so much was documented in writing, and could be translated while we worked. But second-guessing can creep in with the length of time needed to translate, and then frustration builds around how that second-guessing drags out a decision. So on day 3 as we were massively behind, I decided to change things up, move around, and reset our creative energy.
I needed both finalized sketches and a service map of sorts outlining the chronological order of concepts and we were running out of time. We put all our idea sketches down without any translation, organized them into chronological order as a team without translation, and without explanation. Then, without discussion (as is typical for design sprints but more difficult in a Bi-Lingual sprint) we walked along the long tables of sketches and used dot voting with markers to highlight our favorite concepts. Finally, we talked briefly about what we liked about the top concepts, took photos, and put them back into Miro with translated descriptions for reference.
Our favorite sketches were voted on, their position in a service map pinpointed by the activity, and I began prototyping at the end of day 3, knowing our interview participants would be arriving bright and early the next morning, ready to test our concept.
I was able to show and receive feedback on a rough wireframe of designs before the rest of the team went home for the day. My manager had fallen ill and was unable to help, but I was able to lean on other members of the team to help organize some of the thoughts and ideas as I dove into prototyping.
Key Feature: Setting Goals & Progress Tracking
Once they received their certificate of completion for training, we would give them access to a digital tool for mentors. In this digital tool they would be able to set goals, access free trainings similar to the mentor training they just completed but more directly beneficial. They would be able to clearly see and track their progress in each one. At each milestone they were also given the option to share their progress with a mentor or a sponsor to gauge whether this would actually generate communications naturally.
Key Feature: Community
Next, in their mentorship dashboard as the home feature, they discovered a social media style community of other mentors. They would be able to filter posts by locations, events, media style or vocation. They could translate into their language posts made by mentors in any of the other 20+ countries Compassion works in and learn from others around the world. We would pay close attention to what kind of posts they thought might live there and gauge their interest in this style of “benefit”.
Testing - Day 4:
Day 4 dawned extra early since I had been up until 3am wrapping up the prototype. We met a couple hours before testing began to translate a branch of the prototype to Spanish.
We used google translate next to the english version at first and then our translator and 2 other Bolivian staff members went through and cleaned up the translation and the testing script.
We moved tables around to create the feeling of an event with different stations, and to facilitate multiple interviews occurring at once.
Participants arrived and each station was tasked with testing a certain part of the experience, scoring responses based on our goals, metrics and risks we had outlined at the start of the sprint. Our Bolivian staff would facilitate the testing, with our English speaking staff following along in the English branch using a translator sitting next to them speaking quietly.
Takeaways:
We learned SO much from this Sprint. We confirmed that alumni saw significant value in the concept of mentorship and would want to participate, especially if it fostered a sense of community.
We confirmed that a lack of time was still definitely a risk, so we would need to ideate more around ways to reassure potential mentors that their time would be protected, and make the process as simple as possible.
We learned that certificates of completion were a highlight of the test. Being able to complete a training and share that with others created a strong positive emotion.
We learned that the concept of furthering education might not even exist in certain rural areas, and whether through mentorship or another means, scaling the knowledge about vocational trainings or other educational opportunities is a huge need.
The quick-send communication style we prototyped into the experience, no more than a sentence here or an auto-generated message when a training was complete were met with strong positive reactions. As is true in the rest of the world, we are moving towards short communications with a quick turn-around, and that needs to be brought into the sponsorship world at Compassion.
The participants felt strongly that if mentorship was established, and the project was successful, that it would have a giant impact on the local communities.
Finally, based on all of these insights, we determined that a digital platform with reusable trainings such as the mentorship training would be a highly positive experience and accomplish our goals. Progress tracking would promote a sense of healthy-identity even without a mentorship relationship. The ability to send updates on progress to a sponsor, to friends and tutors upon completion of individual steps in each training would be motivating and provide development activities with quick-touch communications alleviating the burden of long-form letter writing while also showing progress to sponsors in key areas.
Final Result
The learnings from the Sprint went on to support several other bodies of work.
Our learnings surrounding mentorship led the team to discover another partner country was launching already launching a program to test mentorship. So the Global Product team is following this pilot test to learn from them, test communications surrounding mentorship and if successful, the Global Program team will have sufficient data to back potentially scaling their efforts.
Our learnings surrounding progress tracking led the Product team to discover a team in another partner country building a tool for digital trainings and progress tracking. The Product team will be partnering with them to generate communications around progress tracking and test Sponsor reactions and participant interest.
Finally, the Product team led another design sprint during the efforts to discover alternative communication methods which was met with great initial success. I did not lead the sprint, but I ran some bodies of bi-lingual asynchronous research surrounding it to test and iterate. If you would like to read the case study on our testing and iteration of the Vision Board concept, it is coming soon, please contact me in the meantime for more details.
