The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
Designing a digital network for knowledge-sharing
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?
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.
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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Prioritizing community pages where exchange was already happening. The result was increased traffic and conversations on those pages.
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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.
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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.
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.
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