COMMUNICATION TOOLKIT: The toolkit we developed for 6th Street Photography included a vision statement, mission statement, core values, and list of services they provide to the community.
INITIAL RESEARCH: We visited 6th Street Photography's three studio locations to interview the leadership, employees, and clients. When we synthesized the information, we found that they were unable to articulate their core identity and what impact they had on the community.
WORKSHOP PREP: We organized a participatory design workshop to get input and buy-in from the organization when building the toolkit. We prototyped and iterated on the workshop activities to make sure they would be as effective as possible when implemented.
PARTICIPATORY DESIGN WORKSHOP: We held the workshop at the main 6th Street studio with people from every stakeholder group participating. Because of my background as a program director, I facilitated the workshop and ran the activities.
WORKSHOP ARTIFACTS: We ran game-storming activities with the group, where they could express themselves in a more organic and candid fashion than through interviews.
SYNTHESIS: We collected the artifacts and used them to run another round of synthesis. When we had distilled down the information, I did the final analysis and copywriting for the toolkit assets.
6th Street Photography
Project Type: Design Strategy, Consulting
Time Frame: 5 Weeks
Collaborators: Shreya Saraf, Prabhav Jain, Sneha Gokhale, Fiona Tian
My team created a communications toolkit for a San Francisco based non-profit called 6th Street Photography. The organization has been around since the early 90's, but recently they had been struggling with internal and external communication. The leadership and members weren't able to concisely articulate what the organization did or what value it provided. It had been affecting their ability to recruit new staff and apply for grants.
The toolkit we developed included a mission statement, vision statement, core values, and service listing. We also included branded collateral so they could start sharing the information with others as soon as possible.
My Process
We began this project by interviewing all of the stakeholders in the organization (leadership, employees, and clients) to understand what pain points and challenges they were facing. After synthesizing the data we had gathered, we discovered that most of their problems stemmed from an inability to communicate the core aspects of their organizational identity.
So we prepared a participatory design workshop to help them develop that material. During the workshop, we had them run through game-storming activities like shared mental mapping and writing love letters to the organization itself. This allowed them to express themselves in a more candid and natural manner than through interviews. We took the artifacts that they had created and distilled the information to create the rough prototype of the toolkit. Over three rounds of iteration with the 6th Street leadership, we finalized the copywriting and presented the final deliverable.
My contribution to the project was in acting as facilitator for the workshop and doing the final copywriting of the toolkit assets.
Learnings
This project helped me learn how to translate my sales experience into a design context. I found that a lot of the skills for consulting are similar: working with clients, building trust, and digging deeper to identify needs rather than stopping at surface level frustrations. The biggest shift was taking those skills a step further and using them to inform design decisions and develop unique solutions.
Want to Learn More?
Check out our process book
FINAL TOOLKIT & MOCKUPS: After we got the final approval from 6th Street on the toolkit, we used the assets to create some marketing collateral for the organization. With these materials, they would be able to start addressing their internal and external communication issues as quickly as possible.