Design for america:
building an alumni community for positive social impact
My Role
As a consultant, I joined the organization to lead the alumni initiative for 4000+ alumni of Design for America.
The Challenge
Formalize programming to keep alumni engaged after graduation and spark connections of impact designers across industries.
Skills
Nonprofit | Event Planning | Fundraising | Email Communications | User Research | Organization Building | Copywriting | Service Design
Context
Building an alumni program for a rapidly growing network
Photo courtesy of Design for America website; Image description: Large group of DFA alumni, students, and mentors jumping outside at the DFA Summit;
Design for America (DFA) is a national network of change makers using human centered design to make positive social impact. Started in 2008, DFA has over 40+ student-led studios on college campuses across the country and a growing alumni network of 4000 social innovators across industries.
Key constraints, including user need and client expertise, drove program design
The National team is a small and mighty team with limited resources to support the 10,000 students, alumni, and professionals in the network. Previously, the team had prototyped programs for alumni as singular events. My role was to cultivate the alumni community by identifying, evaluating, and piloting programs and a new volunteer leadership structure. My goal was to develop a mostly self-sustaining program strategy with intentional touch points from the National organization.
Image description: Words: sustainable, iterative and intentional.
Research
Defining the needs of alumni
To begin, I interviewed 10 alumni a few years out of college as well as soon-to-be grads to understand the needs of alumni at different points in their career. Over the course of my time with DFA, I spoke with 150+ alumni about their wants and needs in the Alumni + Friends Network.
Image description: Four colorful post-its with questions on them. What do alumni expect from a DFA Alumni and Friends network? What challenges do alumni face as professionals? What topics are alumni passionate about? How do alumni incorporate the DFA social impact and human centered design mindsets into their lives?
I launched a 2-day conference for alumni + young professionals as my first program prototype. The insights from interviews informed the programming content and the conference was the official launch of the alumni network organizational structure.
Interviewing alumni.
Image description: Picture of three people talking with post-its and papers on a table in front of them.
Alumni retreat to plan and strategize programs for the coming year.
Image description: Picture of a group of 17 people standing together and smiling. Five people are sitting in a row in front.
insights
DFA is first and foremost about the network of people
Based on research, I developed personas with feedback from DFA staff. The creation of personas created a guide to develop programs that intentionally include the different groups of alumni.
Graduating from 40+ universities across the country, the experiences and expectations of alumni greatly differed.
Distributed network = build locally + online community
Interviewees remarked on the inspiration and motivation from the people in the network. Building community through a distributed network needs to utilize both virtual connections and local communities. Alumni began their DFA journeys as students working on projects in their local community and now look for the same local comradery.
Professional + personal network
DFA has shaped careers and mindsets towards social impact. Alumni want to engage with a community of like-minded professionals in addition to career development. It cannot be a cookie-cutter professional network.
Different levels of commitment
In addition to different expectations, there is a range of desired involvement with the alumni organization. Some people want to actively lead or mentor while others only want to be passive participants.
Word-of-mouth communication
Communicating a new alumni program to soon-to-be graduates can be a combination of emails and personal outreach. The most effective method for reaching current alumni a few years removed from DFA is through friend referrals rather than emails.
The program design and outcomes
Founding the Alumni Board
In synthesizing the research, we developed a mission and 4-year strategy for the alumni network. The first step was recruiting a volunteer alumni board to oversee the programs and ensure alignment with alumni needs.
Mission: Drive the growth of DFA alumni by connecting alumni with the greater network, creating opportunities for alumni to coach local studios, and increasing alumni contribution to ensure DFA continues to inspire social good as a lifelong practice.
Creating an organization structure
Image description: Three stacked, rectangular boxes. Top box says, “national team.” Middle box says, “alumni board with 5 silhouettes.” Bottom box says, “city ambassadors with 9 dots.”
Extreme intentionality needed to be put into development of the organizational structure of the alumni network to ensure continuation and sustainment of the alumni programs by DFA staff.
Piloting, evaluating, and iterating on programs & initiatives
In the spirit of human-centered design, all programs were built as prototypes with the goal of collecting feedback and iterating. I aligned each initiative to the larger, strategic priorities and mission of the organization which included financial security and strengthened connections across the multi-generational network of students, alumni, and educators.
Image description: Group of people sitting and working around a long rectangular table.
DFA City Ambassadors
Recruited and on-boarded 9 city ambassadors to build local DFA alumni communities in Boston, Chicago, DC, New York, and San Francisco.
I managed stakeholders in a transparent and mission-oriented manner to accomplish the shared vision of building a community of like-minded designers for social impact.
Image description: Screenshot of the DFA Alumni and Friends slack workspace.
DFA virtual community
Encouraging increased involvement on our slack community by making it a welcoming and accessible community. This remains the hub of online activity and has sparked book clubs, job connections, and lunch chats.
During my time with DFA, weekly active users increased by 342%.
Lexi created essential support systems to build local DFA communities throughout the country. Thanks to that structure, the alumni network empowered alumni to organize both formal and informal events to bring diverse perspectives together. - Alex Sher, Chicago Ambassador, 2019
Image description: Screenshot of a mailchimp newsletter that includes a group of people standing and smiling.
Giving Tuesday
Led giving campaign to encourage alumni financial support of the nonprofit organization. My role involved communications, storytelling of the mission and impact of DFA, and coordinated outreach.
We doubled personal contributions YoY.
Image description: Group of people sitting and standing around a table in a pub.
DFA Night Out: 10 cities, 1 night
Coordinated, marketed, and recruited city leads for 10 meetups in cities around the country all happening on the same night. The goal was to build local communities and create connections. Read more here.
Image description: Group of people in a workshop standing around and talking in pairs.
Image description: Birds eye view of people seated in rows of chairs in a wood shop. Speaker in front talking to the audience.
Image description: Three people sitting in desks in an auditorium and discussing. Woman on right is holding papers. People sitting in rows of desks behind them.
DFA Summit: bringing together 300+ students, alumni, professionals and educators interested in design for social impact
Designed two iterations of the Create Impact Conference for alumni and professionals as part of the DFA Summit with the inaugural event in 2018. Developed programming for young professionals, increased conference attendance by 290% year over year, and recruited over 100 speakers for the 2019 DFA Summit. Read more here.
Used feedback and analyzed operational data—impact of different recruitment tactics, diversity in attendees’ backgrounds, ticket sales, additional opportunities for programming—to improve program throughout the year and second iteration of the Create Impact Conference. The Net Promoter Score in the first year was +30.8 and +50 in the second year.
reflections
Lessons learned
Levels of engagement
In this project, my motto was to engage as many alumni as possible who wanted to be involved. Throughout my time with DFA, I spoke with over 150 alumni to shape this community. The alumni network is mainly a group of young professionals moving cities, changing jobs, and transitioning from student to professional. Passion is essential but commitment and action-oriented qualities are very important in the early stages of building the alumni network. It is critical to assess and predict the commitment of new grads to find a proper level of engagement. Defining a minimum requirement of years out of school before joining as a board member or ambassador improved commitment and created a leadership pipeline. Developing different types of engagement – planners, mentors, attendees – are needed to develop a healthy alumni network.
Prototype early and small
My approach is a balance of strategic and tactical. Programs can be prototyped on a small scale, and prototyping is important before releasing to a broader network. When prototyping the first year of city ambassadors, we learned that more structure and support were needed for cities to excel. This feedback was incorporated into the second year of city ambassadors. Not everything is going to work, and some programs need to be evaluated against the amount of effort to see if they should be sustained. Defining goals (and stretch goals) as well as measures of success help to iterate on programs.