Start with the people who show up.
The Indiana Region of the American Red Cross is a volunteer-led organization. Many of its volunteers were nearing retirement age, and the region needed a new generation to carry the work forward.
Talking with volunteers directly showed the issue wasn’t unhappiness or disengagement. The region needed younger volunteers who could commit their time over the long run.
Learn the method on real work.
CXD trained the Volunteer Services team in design thinking and people-centered design. Instead of practice exercises, the team used its own volunteer recruitment and onboarding process as the training project.
The team interviewed volunteers and stakeholders, analyzed what they heard, and drew a map of the volunteer experience from the volunteers’ point of view.
Then the team took it from there.
Mapping the process, the team found a pain point in recruitment that the organization didn’t know existed. They addressed it themselves.
That is what design thinking training is for. CXD taught the method. The team used it to change its own work.
What the team reported back.
After the team addressed that pain point, the region reported a 40% increase in volunteers successfully onboarded.
The team later used the same approach to rebuild an event program in a single week. The first two events it ran afterward scored 98.8% and 98.6% participant satisfaction.
These are the Red Cross team’s results, reached with a method they learned on their own work.
Source: American Red Cross, Indiana Region, as reported to CXD.
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What this work illustrates
The team that does the workcan learn to redesign it.
The Red Cross team found the problem and fixed it with a method they learned on their own work. The result is theirs.
