FutureMakers
Inspiring collective engagement to help children's futures
Problem: FutureMakers is a nonprofit collective impact initiative that seeks to increase the proportion of individuals with postsecondary degrees in Southwest Florida’s workforce. It consists of schools and other educational organizations across several counties, which work together to achieve the coalition’s goals. FutureMaker's director wanted to improve collaboration and communication within FutureMakers in order to help the coalition to grow.
Goal: Provide recommendations to help FutureMakers to improve its communication tools, so that it can more easily communicate with its member organizations, and with outside stakeholders.
Solution Overview: Our team recommended changes to FutureMaker's website to make it easier for stakeholders to learn about and engage with FutureMakers, and to make it easier for members to collaborate. We also recommended additional communication tools outside of the website to make communication across members more efficient.
Project Duration: 4 months
Team: 4 members. All members contributed to all parts of this project.
Tools: Qualtrics, Figma, QuestionPro
Process
Interviews
Four user interviews were performed to explore members’ and stakeholders' challenges in collaborating with FutureMakers. The interviews were recorded and transcribed. We then wrote notes denoting every distinct fact from each interview and organized them by recurring themes. These themes informed our actionable findings and recommendations.
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Despite our limited sample size, we also decided to create personas from our data, in order to make our findings more accessible to stakeholders.
Novice Persona (click to enlarge)
Intermediate Persona (click to enlarge)
Expert Persona (click to enlarge)
Key Findings:
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Collaboration is fundamental to FutureMaker's mission. However, poor communication hinders project teams and organizations from coordinating effectively.
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It is difficult for FutureMakers to define itself to its members- many members see it as an extension of its parent organization. Rather its parent organization created it to be a decentralized initiative whose member organizations work towards a common goal.
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Communication of outcomes in an accessible member is useful for encouraging engagement from outside stakeholders. However, such communication could be improved.
Comparative Evaluation
We performed a comparative evaluation to determine how other organizations similar to FutureMakers promote effective communication. We rated 10 organizations across a variety of criteria, such such as budget, number of members, and scale.
Key Findings:
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Organizations with smaller service areas also have smaller staff sizes (including paid staff and volunteers). Because FutureMakers lacks full-time staff, it is at a disadvantage compared to other regional-scale organizations such as Beyond Basics and Mercy Education Project.
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Many successful organizations present their outcomes and metrics on their websites in an exceptionally accessible manner. FutureMakers could do better at this. Below is an infographic from Mercy Education Project's website, giving an overview of its metrics for success.
A graph depicting the relative staff size and service area of various
education-assistance organizations
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Infographic on Mercy Education
Project's homepage
Surveys
Based on the findings from the comparative evaluation and the interviews, we were interested in determining:
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What digital tools members need to more openly communicate and collaborate with each other
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What digital tools would help FutureMakers to get members and stakeholders to become more motivated to invest their time and resources into the coalition
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What digital tools FutureMakers could use to make it easier for members and stakeholders to understand how the coalition functions as a collective action initiative
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To address these questions, we surveyed FutureMakers members and outside stakeholders. Based on our findings, we suggested a variety of recommendations.
Key Findings and Recommendations:
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Blog-Style Events Page- Respondents’ most frequent reason for visiting the FutureMakers website is to learn about upcoming events. This could be leveraged to convey more information about FutureMaker's function as a collective impact. A blog-styled events page in place of the current, calendar-styled events page could be used to provide more detailed information when clicking on a particular entry.​
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For what reasons do you usually visit FutureMaker's website?
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More Effective Meetings- Many respondents indicated that meetings are useful for learning about the activities of other FutureMakers members, and about how the coalition functions as a collective impact. Additionally, respondents seemed to be motivated to contribute to FutureMakers by learning about the positive contributions of other FutureMakers members. Meetings should be remotely accessible (even after the COVID pandemic). Additionally, meeting minutes and recordings should be available on the website. These changes would facilitate the sharing of accomplishments.
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What forms of communication have helped you to understand how FutureMakers works?
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Highlight Important Information using Infographics- The FutureMakers website could better communicate the coalition's function and draw attention to achievements. Infographics and summary statistics are a good way to do this. In particular, an infographic demonstrating how FutureMakers functions as a collective impact initiative, would be especially helpful.
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What kinds of communication tools are especially helpful for you in learning about the work that members of FutureMakers are doing?
Usability Test
We conducted usability tests to explore the challenges that users had in using the FutureMakers website. We recruited educational professionals who had no familiarity with FutureMakers , and observed them as they performed tasks on the FutureMakers website. We then interviewed them to learn more about their experiences and perceptions of the website. The tasks that participants performed during the test included:
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Finding out what FutureMakers does, and how to contact them
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Figuring out how their organization would get involved with FutureMakers
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Determining how their organization would donate to FutureMakers
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Determining how they would make an individual donation to FutureMakers
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Based on the findings from the usability tests, we offered several recommendations. Here are the most compelling that we can divulge without showing what the website looks like (and violating our NDA):
Key Findings and Recommendations:
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Make it more clear how FutureMakers works- Participants noted that although it is clear what FutureMakers does, it is not clear how it does it. We recommend incorporating specific anecdotes of organizational effectiveness throughout the site.
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Use a clearer CTA- Provide more information about what joining FutureMakers means. Currently, there is a call to action that says “Sign the Wall”, which was ambiguous to participants. A more clear CTA or an explanation of what this means would be ideal.
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Add contact information to the contact page: The contact page currently has a generic form that the user can use to send an email to FutureMakers. However, this email is not associated with an actual person who works there. If feasible, a list of individuals who work for FutureMakers and their contact information should be included on the contact page.
Next Steps
After FutureMaker's director received our recommendations, the webmaster implemented many of our recommendations into FutureMaker's website. For example, infographics were added to the carousel on the homepage to communicate the coalition's function and draw attention to achievements.
Original carousel on homepage
New carousel on homepage
