YouthBuild USA

Over the course of my 14 years at YouthBuild USA, I led the organization through several major design and development projects.

Challenge:

Expensive CRM that did not cater to the organizations needs.
Staff was “going rogue” due to difficulty of, specifically, mass mailing tools. We were at risk of undoing all of our opt-in/opt-out goodwill.

Process:

Partnered with our Data Services team to interview each department about their work to translate this into CRM functionality and training.
Turned CRM requirements and tasks into wireframes and workflows and passed off to developer.
Developed a taxonomy for the CRM data structure along with plans for importing the data.
Acted as Product Owner during intensive 12-week Agile development process with development team
Led the information architecture development and content migration to Drupal.

Results

Deeper organizational buy-in and use of CRM.
Thousands of emails sent to stakeholder network per month with clean opt-in/opt-out rules and workflows.
Due to ongoing work with stakeholders and the trust that was earned pre-launch, continued iterative development of CRM.
Year of launch, our team received organizational award for teamwork.

Challenge:

20+ years of accumulated knowledge had not been digitized.
A dispersed network of over 200 local youth development organizations who could not afford to travel to conferences, needed access to this knowledge.

Process:

I interviewed stakeholders and audited existing knowledge documentation.
I created a content inventory and ran several card sorts to categorize content with various user groups.
I built wireframes and passed off to developer for build.
Introduced the Knowledge Bank concept to the organization, evangelizing the tool pre-launch.

Results:

Post-launch, the organization agreed to fund a Knowledge Bank position. I sat on the hiring committee (and ultimately trained) the first Knowledge Bank Manager on the tool post-launch.
Thousands of documents were digitized and categorized giving access to hundreds of programs around the country and internationally.

Challenge:

YouthBuild USA and YouthBuild International were united under one umbrella, but had separate websites.
The organization had a public-facing website and a log-in data reporting tool that did not talk to each other leading to inaccurate public program data and demographics.

Process:

I conducted user interviews with staff and local program stakeholders.
I used data and research to balance the business needs of the organization and the local programs, with our need to tell a compelling story to bring in donors.
I created wireframes that I handed off to developers and project managed the design, user experience and content writing through to launch.
I worked closely with the data team to assure integration with current CRM, often acting as the translator between our internal developer and external designers and developers.
Engaged students from Bentley College master’s in Human Factors in Information Design to conduct a heuristic evaluation & user survey to develop wireframes to revamp the user interface of our site reporting tool.

Results:

YouthBuild USA and YouthBuild International began to present a compelling and unified brand story–beginning to eliminate the confusion between the two.
The new website’s program directory pulled from the log-in data reporting tool to allow for immediate and up-to-date program information for our public audiences including donors and funders.
Unified log-in for all tools offered by the organization for internal and external stakeholders, which increased engagement two-fold.