The Challenge: To accelerate progress on closing the credential gap for low income and students of color, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation asked, what if we piloted a digital platform that could bring together all of our grantees in one place to share knowledge and exchange ideas as they develop tools and resources for higher education institutions? 

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The Idea: For the pilot to succeed, this digital community would have to stand out amongst the many other platforms grantee members used on a regular basis. It would provide value if it increased visibility and offered connections to peers with complimentary expertise. 

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The Design: I led the engagement of a core group of users — Engagement Leaders— who had the potential to influence the behavior of other members. I mapped their current onboarding journey and used webinars and surveys to collect feedback on the online experience as it was designed. Then, I used three tactics to help increase visibility and connections with peers:

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1. Prioritizing community pages where exchange was already happening. The result was increased traffic and conversations on those pages.

2. Increasing peer-to-peer touchpoints (webinars, feedback sessions, trainings, etc) where Engagement Leaders could share goals and ideas. The result was practitioners (e.g. 2-year and 4-year institutions) who don’t normally meet began exchanging ideas.

3. Building capacity to increase online engagement by producing a toolkit that would help Engagement Leaders manage online collaboration on any community platform. The result was a members’ journey with actions, tools, and best practices to guide an engagement plan. 

 

 

The Result: ​The pilot was extended with the eventual decision to focus on maintaining the digital platform for one of the grantee networks whose work spanned across the higher education sector.

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Sample Work: Over the course of two years, we continually updated personas to represent new design use cases; we designed engagement challenges to increase activity; and produced a toolkit that would help take users on a step by step process to build engagement.