CLIENT: Agora Partnerships

DATES: January 2019 - May 2019

COMPANY
Agora Partnerships is a pioneering international organization accelerating the shift towards a more sustainable and equitable world through the visionary impact entrepreneurs it supports. Agora equips entrepreneurs with the knowledge, tools and networks needed for the next level of growth.

CHALLENGE
My challenge was to create a new service with significant earned revenue that would also increase the brand footprint of Agora across Latin America.

APPROACH
Given Agora’s decades long experience in the impact entrepreneurial ecosystem in Latin America, the team already had several ideas for new products. This project therefore focused on exploring the potential of each of these ideas as well as generating new ideas in a co-created manner.

The preparation phase of the project involved engaging team members in vision definition, strengths/weaknesses mapping and current financial performance analysis. The research phase was designed to involve outside stakeholders to conduct market trend analysis and engage in user needs interviews.

Data from these activities were used to facilitate individual and team ideation sessions, using an Ansoff matrix for frameworking and a 9-factor weighted decision matrix for voting. In the forming phase of the project, we used competitive scans, market demand analysis, business model canvases, product costing and innovation financial forecasting to analyze the products with highest probability of success.

After testing lo fi prototypes of the most promising services with end users, we moved into the launch phase using a service roadmap and commercialization strategy.

RESULTS
The ultimate result was a train-the-trainer service that launched in April 2019 and has already been sold to Mexican and Nicaraguan government entities, carrying a margin of 15% each. Additional interest in the service has been expressed from ecosystem players and corporate partners across the region.

LESSONS LEARNT
A major lesson learnt in this project was the importance of political context when both developing a new product and attempting to sell it. A careful balance between end user needs and buyer agendas must be considered at each phase and particularly in the forming and launch phases to ensure market feasibility.

CLIENT: Agora Partnerships

DATES: March 2018 - December 2018

COMPANY
Agora Partnerships is a pioneering international organization accelerating the shift towards a more sustainable and equitable world through the visionary impact entrepreneurs it supports. Agora equips entrepreneurs with the knowledge, tools and networks needed for the next level of growth.

CHALLENGE
Agora’s brief stipulated the re-design of its flagship accelerator model to meet new funding realities and the shifting accelerator landscape. After three years of donor-based financing, the model could no longer rely wholly on grants and instead had to shift to a more sustainable model that better addressed the needs of Latin American entrepreneurs in an increasingly competitive marketplace.

APPROACH
Given the team’s deep knowledge of the entrepreneurial ecosystem in Latin America, only light market research and regional stakeholder mapping were conducted to kick off the project. In the first full phase of the project, I created a series of customer personas derived from organizational data and one-on-one interviews with dozens of entrepreneurs who had either passed through an Agora program or who had no affiliation.

We used the customer personas to facilitate a full day team ideation session against a design brief that called for a more efficient program offering. The ideas were frameworked using clustering and tension plotting to find the best combination of potential options to explore.

Storyboards and customer journeys (5 E’s) for principal stakeholders were created for the most promising ideas. These assets were then used to draft a lean canvas of each idea including Key questions, key needs, must haves, nice-to-haves, general cost and revenue structures and a rough implementation timeline.

The most promising and sustainable re-structuring ideas passed to the prototyping phase where we created medium fidelity prototypes of program websites. Landing pages and website were tested with end users via individual feedback sessions and Facebook ads smoke testing.

We used these data to focus on the prototype with the most traction, parlaying it into a higher fidelity product with accompanying theory of change and key performance indicators for ease of tracking later down the line.

Throughout this project, I engaged in individual and group team calls as well as co-creation sessions to respond to wariness of change on the part of some key team members.

RESULTS
This project resulted in the creation of a new competitive 3-stage acceleration program that allowed Agora to increase both its breadth and depth of impact. The three stages included a series of theme-specific 3-day bootcamps, targeted 1:1 consulting services mostly focused on financial modeling, and access to capital raise products and services. The program was successfully piloted in Chile in early 2019 with subsequent planned full or partial cycles in Peru, Ecuador and Chile throughout 2019. The restructured program covers 27% to 37% of costs via direct earned income in years 1 to 3 respectively vs. the 14% that the old structure covered.

LESSONS LEARNT
Although team members were involved in most stages of this project, internal culture challenges necessitated much more 1:1 communication than previously anticipated. These challenges were mitigated with frequent meetings and calls but more padding time will be included in the next project to ensure it is on track.

CLIENT: Lindblad Expeditions

DATES: March 2017 - August 2017

COMPANY
Lindblad Expeditions is National Geographic’s adventure expedition company whose team includes naturalists, photographers, undersea specialists, historians, and cultural specialists to ensure engaging and connected travel.

CHALLENGE
Lindblad’s LEX-NG Artisan Fund supports artisans at the nexus of tourism, handcraft and conservation. The Fund wanted to support indigenous artisans in the Peruvian Amazon rainforest to help them build stronger livelihoods while encouraging conservation. With a local community-based organization, Minga Peru, and a handcraft consultancy, By Hand Consulting, the group determined a radio show aired in specific Amazonian communities would be the best form of program dissemination. The group hired me to create the radio show.

APPROACH
Since Minga Peru, the on-the-ground partner in this alliance, had deep experience with the target Amazonian communities, I started this project having calls with their staff and reading through/listening to past program content they had created for health and wellness programs directed at the same communities.

I interviewed staff members who worked directly with the target population to understand artisans’ needs and challenges. I also engaged with outside experts who had worked with the artisans of these communities in the past on very specific topics such as natural dyes and palm conservation.

The next step in the project was a co-created episode plan with Minga Peru and several entrepreneurial leaders of the Amazonian communities. Topics included product quality control, product design, product costing and pricing, client communication, gender-based leadership and raw materials conservation.

Direct pilot testing was not possible in this particular project, so to test the content and structure of our episode plan, I created scripts (complete with stage directions) for two episodes only. Minga Peru recorded and aired the episodes in one community to collect feedback, gauge understanding, and receive suggestions. Subsequent episodes were created based on initial feedback, pausing every five episodes to collect more feedback from aired shows in order to refine and re-structure content for remaining episodes.

RESULTS
The final deliverable of this project were 32 forty-five minute radio shows each touching on a different facet of artisan development and grounded in cultural context. The economic improvements resulting from this project were difficult to measure due to lack of baseline information, but satisfaction rates among Amazonian artisans and partners were high.

LESSONS LEARNT
Having direct access to the target population for testing is a key component of creating successful projects. In lieu of this however, working via community-based partners can work if they are briefed on and on board with the design process.

CLIENT: Torus Teens

DATES: January 2016 - April 2017

COMPANY
Torus Teens is a platform that connects underserved teenagers in the US with life-changing afterschool and summer programs. They give teens the power to explore their interests and build their networks outside of the classroom.

CHALLENGE
This project is an organization I co-founded to give underserved teens the opportunity to develop themselves outside of the formal education system. The challenge was to design a platform that was user friendly for both teens who are digital natives and out-of-school providers who are generally digitally illiterate.

APPROACH
The very beginning of this project started with literature reviews, 1:1 interviews with dozens of teenage students, parents, teachers and administrators and a scan of the competitive landscape. The information from these activities were frameworked in order to extract insights that lead to the creation of two user experience journeys, MVP plan, and product roadmap.

To ensure the end user was always a part of the design process, I hired several high school interns to design the first rounds of platform mockups. The teens created lofi paper prototypes and tested them with other teens in the city. Several rounds of iteration and re-testing ensued. Meanswhile, I worked with out-of-school program providers to co-design a back-end registration system that was user friendly and efficient.

Semi-final designs were created and tested with a steering group of both teens and out-of-school leaders to ensure all sides understood the others’ needs and had a voice in the process.

To launch the product, we created partnerships with hundreds of high schools via affiliate organizations, the NYC Department of Education, dozens of out-of-school providers, and leading nonprofits working in the space.

RESULTS
The final product was a platform that allowed NYC teens to browse and directly apply to hundreds of free and low cost out-of-school programs in NYC. The first full year the platform was alive saw over 14,000 NYC teen users with a 67% return rate, resulting in thousands of applications to out-of-school opportunities.

LESSONS LEARNT
It’s a challenge to meet the varying needs of diverse end-users (teens, out-of-school providers, schools). Individual ideation and creation is key to giving those with less of a voice a space in the design process, but bringing groups together in a well-facilitated atmosphere is also instrumental to creating a double-sided product that will actually be used.

CLIENT: Small Fry

DATES: March 2014 - May 2015

COMPANY
Small Fry trains and then directly employs digitally savvy youth to do online marketing for local small business for holistic community development.

CHALLENGE
Create a sustainable program that creates economic opportunity for both underserved young people and micro- and small-businesses in disadvantaged communities.

APPROACH
I approached the development of the organization’s business model and programs using lean start-up and design thinking methodologies. I needed to understand what both youth and small business owners needed to succeed economically and what they would respond to in terms of solutions to those needs.

I worked with teams of volunteers from the Acumen+/IDEO Human Centered Design program, as well as with design thinking practitioners from The Design Gym’s community, to conduct research, create prototypes, test prototypes, and iterate based on feedback.

To test the youth-serving side of the organization, I conducted a 5-month pilot training program informed by leading industry expert’s content and feedback. The 14 students participating in the program were tasked with providing critical feedback after each session to create a repository of successful and unsuccessful learning projects. At the conclusion of the training program, they were interviewed by a third party to extract final insights. All learnings throughout this phase were frameworked and distilled down to insights statements to use in later iterations of the program.

To create and test the small business owner-serving side of the organization, we interviewed dozens of small business owners in Harlem to get a preliminary idea of their online needs. We frameworked this data to create a list of must-haves that were incorporated into the first lo-fi website prototype. We tested the first prototype with a dozen small business owners and used their feedback to iterate on the model and create a product roadmap. The resulting MVP was again tested with 40 additional small business owners around NYC.

We used the MVP and our process to get accepted to both the Global Social Benefit Incubator Online program, and MassChallenge, the world’s largest accelerator and a top-ranking program in the US.

RESULTS
The result from this project was a pilot organization that trained 4 cohorts of youth in two cities to deliver online marketing services to approximately 3 small business clients each. The youth were paid a fair wage and gained marketable skills while the small business clients attracted more customers and increased their revenues.

LESSONS LEARNT
Interviewing users is an important and necessary strategy for any project, but user observation and testing is perhaps even more important. Small Fry very accurately demonstrated Margaret Mead’s adage “what people say, what people do, and what they say they do are entirely different things”. While users from both sides of the double-sided marketplace said they wanted the platform and demonstrated in early testing that they did, upon launch the business model faltered and ultimately destroyed its growth potential.

CLIENT: Design Gym

DATES: September 2014 & March 2015

COMPANY
The Design Gym is a creative agency that empowers people inside of organizations to break things, make things, and create dramatically better ways to work.

CHALLENGE
Coach professionals through Design Gym’s signature learning experience, the Studio Project, a multi-week workshop in which professionals learn human centered design while working with a real client to create a final deliverable.

APPROACH
Each Studio Project begins with the client proposing a design brief to the group of learners. For example, Viad’s guiding question was How might we create personalized and inspiring experiences for a new generation attending live events?, and Teach for America’s was How might we build excitement within the next generation to become teachers?

To kick-off the Explore phase of, I coached each group through establishing a knowledge base and defining assumptions. We then identified client-related expert and participant interview subjects and created discussion guides to structure the in-depth interviews to come. Each Studio Project participant was tasked with conducting several in-depth interviews to collect data that addressed the client’s design brief.

I coached teams through the Understand phase while they frameworked their interview findings. Frameworks explored included: clustering, tension spectrums, concentric circles, funnels, user journeys, and 2x2 matrices. I then guided the groups to create concise insight statements based on key findings and tension points. These statements proved extremely useful to clients and served as a springboard for their own internal strategy discussions.

In the 8-week Studio Project, we used the insights statements to kick-off the Ideation phase, during which I coached the teams through rapid individual and group brainstorming to generate as many ideas (with and without constraints) as possible.

RESULTS
The final deliverable for the Studio Project was a set of recommendations delivered to the client via in-person presentation (aided by a visual designer). The Viad project focused on presenting major insights and ideas to explore, while the Teach for America presentation focused on major insights gleaned from the research and frameworking the team did. In each case, clients expressed a great deal of delight and satisfaction with the outcomes.

CLIENT: AHA Bolivia

DATES: December 2013 - September 2014

COMPANY
AHA Bolivia is an ethical manufacturer based in Bolivia, working to provide designers and retailers in the US, Europe, and Asia with high quality, handcrafted knit garments and accessories. The organization holds fair trade production practices and principles at its core and works with local artisans to preserve age-old knitting techniques, using largely local, sustainable fibers.

CHALLENGE
The often contentious political and business environment of Bolivia means that small enterprises like AHA Bolivia must weather policy and trade changes nimbly. Sometimes that means changing internal structures and sometimes that means rallying to secure new clients due to a drop off caused by trade barriers. AHA Bolivia had survived for 15 years, but largely based on ad hoc processes that focused on ‘putting-out-fires’. They needed to understand, in partnership with the ICCO Foundation, the internal challenges they had control over so that they could create a more efficient and effective enterprise able to weather changes and keep their artisans employed.

APPROACH
To kick off the project, I conducted in-depth interviews with all key staff members as well as collected and reviewed documents and other assets. Based off this data, I built and facilitated a week-long design thinking and gamestorming workshop for all key staff members in Bolivia (in Spanish). The workshop included values mapping exercises to expose assumptions, process mapping activities to build empathy and discover pain points, and ideation sessions to co-create solutions to the challenges identified.

I participated in some additional remote ideation sessions with more plugged-in key staff members to ensure a diversity of solutions that included technology as well as cross-cultural thinking. I frameworked all of the solutions against a 2x2 matrix and created a plan of action based on the feasibility of each of the quadrants in the matrix.

We launched the prototype phase in Bolivia together and then I remotely coached key staff members responsible for solutions. We had bi-weekly check-in calls to distill learnings and work through additional hurdles. We were able to test all short-term solutions together but additional longer-term ideas were left for staff to test on their own.

RESULTS
A robust efficiency and workplace culture plan that was implemented by staff members to decrease errors, increase on-time delivery of product, and create a better working atmosphere.

LESSONS LEARNT
Taiichi Ohno’s 5 Whys proved instrumental to this project. Cultural norms in Bolivia dictate the telling of white lies when the answer is not known. Using a combination of ethnographic research, process observations and the 5 Whys gave us a clear picture of the organization's pain points, which otherwise had remained hidden for the last 15 years.

CLIENT: Proyecto Horizonte (Ushpa Ushpa)

DATES: February - May 2011

COMPANY
Proyecto Horizonte is a non-profit and non-governmental organization based in Mineros San Juan, Bolivia. It began its work in 2004 as a privately funded organization and since then has been supporting communities to implement programs in education, health and community development. The organization funds and manages a daycare, 600-student school, adult night school, community health center, and a variety of economic development and cultural projects.

CHALLENGE
As Mineros San Juan became officially recognized by the city of Cochabamba, it was clear Proyecto Horizonte needed to restructure to take advantage of government-run educational and health programs while expanding other community initiatives that could provide more support and development for the community. I partnered with Proyecto Horizonte leadership and staff to understand the current processes, identify redundant programs, and to pinpoint opportunities for expansion of a more innovative and holistic structure. Ultimately, Proyecto Horizonte was interested in streamlining their model so that it could serve as a blueprint for other organizations around the globe.

APPROACH
I spent three months understanding the details of often undocumented and ad-hoc processes for almost every department of the organization. I started with in-depth interviews of all full time staff members in each department: health care, school, culture and sports, administration and communication, microfinance, and the women’s microenterprise program. Included in these interviews were deep dives into written assets and computer systems when available. I then spent time observing beneficiaries interact with the services of each department to understand the value created and the effectiveness of delivery.  

From this research, I recorded historical development of programs, articulated department objectives, and documented step-by-step procedures for key processes. All of this was distilled down to extract big picture learnings that I used to create a final recommendations deck that would allow the organization to concentrate on programs that were impactful, yet relatively easily replicable.

RESULTS
The final deliverable was a set of recommendations of programs and projects to parlay into state-ownership versus those that should be replicated by the organization and in fact spread to other communities via targeted partnerships with various community-based organizations.

LESSONS LEARNT
Employing the idea of standing in the room was instrumental to this project. Obvious foreigners contracted to create projects for organizations must be even more careful to listen and observe. Understanding cultural norms and standards can make the difference between a successful and unsuccessful project, so being in the space and knowing when and how to speak are key.

CLIENT: Global Goods Partners

DATES: November 2009 - February 2010

COMPANY
Global Goods Partners creates economic opportunity for women in some of the world’s poorest nations by providing them with access to the US market to sell their fair trade goods.

CHALLENGE
Global Goods Partners needed to determine a strategic direction for their next fiscal year that both created the most impact in the communities they served, and generated revenue to sustain the organization. As the Director of Marketing and Operations, I was tasked with leading the strategic planning initiatives of the organization.

APPROACH
To develop a plan based on key strengths, we first needed to understand how all of the company’s processes were working, where the holes were, how the community partners viewed the impact being created, what was selling and not selling, and what the general market trajectory looked like. I worked with staff members to collect and analyze all of this internal and external data. Additionally, I interviewed key players in the industry to extract learnings from them and get a baseline benchmark for the company.  

We used all of these findings and documents to convene a staff retreat in which we brainstormed solutions and formulated a strategic plan for the coming year. The strategic plan included objectives and concrete plans to implement solutions for:

1) Strengthening the partner microenterprise portfolio  
On-boarding new partners based on on-site observations, interviews, survey assessments, product reviews, and their administrative capacity

2) Providing a more robust marketplace for microenterprise partner products
Re-building the e-commerce website to be more user friendly

3) Strengthening Global Goods Partners’ web presence via online marketing
Building wholesale relationships

4) Reformatting branding assets

5) Streamlining internal operations to make the best use of limited resources
Creating accounting manuals and procedures
Solidifying warehouse policies and relationships

RESULTS
The final deliverable was a strategic planning document, microenterprise partner support timeline, and online marketing plan. The combined outcomes of these plans were a new wholesale line of business that accounted for 25% of sales, a 52% expansion of the microenterprise network and 30% growth of earned revenue via the ecommerce platform.