Encompass

Overview

In the spring of 2018, I applied and was accepted to the AIGA Changemaker series, a design for good initiative that pairs creatives with nonprofits in need of design help in the Seattle area. Every year, the series highlights a particular cause, and in 2018, the issue was nurturing local youth. The organizations which were selected were:

• Arts Corps

• Art with Heart

• Juma

• Powerful Voices

• The Seattle Indian Health Board

• Encompass

  Scope of Project

  4 months

  Role

  Copywriter/Researcher

  Value of Project

  I was placed on the team that would be helping Encompass. Encompass is an organization in North Bend, WA whose mission is to create a community where all children thrive. Over a 40-year history, Encompass has offered programs in early learning, pediatric therapy, and family enrichment, in addition to running a very well-respected preschool program. Although firmly enmeshed in the community and beloved by the countless families who have expressed gratitude for its programs, Encompass has noticed a steady decline in the number of parents who are taking advantage of their free parenting programs. As Encompass would like to continue to be a valuable community resource, their marketing team reached out for support from the Changemaker Series in order to better meet the needs of the communities it represents.

Process: Team Introduction and Building

During the first weekend of May 2018, myself and 50 other creatives met up in a loft space in Seattle, eager to become a part of their teams and learn about the mission of the organizations that we would be helping. In addition to ice-breaking and team-building things, we learned more about the history of Encompass as well as some of its organizational structure. We were assigned our team roles (Project Manager, Copywriter, Researcher, Strategist, Designer) and spoke individually about our reasons for applying to the program and our goals on the team. We practiced some guerrilla research, going out as a team to the Seattle Pier and attempting to find out from those we met if they volunteered; why/why not; and what value they thought it brought to their communities. We wanted to understand not only our role within the nonprofit space, but the values and judgements that others had with regards to it.

Our afternoon workshops consisted of learning about storytelling and synthesis, and then we spent Sunday beginning to examine Encompass more in-depth. Our Encompass contacts, Sam and Colleen, gave us a little bit more background into Encompass’s unique position within their community and gave us more detail about the kinds of programs that they were contributing to. It was an exciting beginning.

Process: Touring Encompass

Encompass’s main site, which houses its early learning center and its administrative staff, is located in North Bend, Washington. It is a beautiful place to encourage young minds to thrive, and the school is accommodating to the needs of its students and parents. It also has a Pediatric Therapy center in town, where children can seek speech and developmental therapy, and a preschool in Carnation, WA.

While on site, our group was shown around the facilities and we were introduced to various staff members, including therapists. We learned about their concerns and motivations, and we were able to ask them questions and zero in on the specific programs that we were being asked to help with: parenting classes.

The team reconvened after our tour of the Encompass facilities, and decided that our research and discovery phase would continue by reaching out to parents for contextual inquiries into their daily lives and stresses, in the hopes that we could better empathize with the challenges facing today’s parents.

process: Empathy Interviews

I wrote a list of questions to use for when I began interviewing parents of young children that I knew in the Seattle area. These included:

1. How would you describe yourself as a parent?

2. What are the biggest challenges that you have as a parent?

3. Do you have a parenting support network? If so, who is in it?

4. What are your goals as a parent for the next year?

Over the next month, I interviewed six parents; some friends, others, acquaintances. The interviews took between 30-60 minutes, and were all recorded. I was able to learn more about the Seattle parenting scene, which includes such assets as PEPs classes (in-home classes featuring those who became parents at the same time) and toddler gyms; and such difficulties as commute and work-life balance. I wrote a summary of my interviews that included what I had learned; the essentials of the conversation; and helpful pull-quotes.

Some of my other teammates also interviewed parents, several of whom were directly affiliated with at least one of the Encompass programs. In all, we ended up interviewing about 12 parents. 8 of these parents had challenges which were considered to be unique, such as needing some kind of therapy (mostly speech) for their children; only 4 parents didn’t identify any specific concerns.

We also wrote a survey for Encompass’s existing clients to see if this data would reveal any shortcomings worth addressing. We were specifically curious about how parents had come to hear about Encompass, and about which resources offered were considered to be the most important. The time had come to synthesize.

When we finished, it looked like this:

process: Results of Affinity mapping

Our synthesizing of insights showed us that there were four major commonalities between all of the parents that we had interviewed or received survey data from:

• Community/ Support (i.e. a need for)

• Failure/Judgement from others

• Technology

• Time/Scheduling conflicts

Other significant commonalities included:

• Isolation

• Unique needs

In summary, parents were in need of other parents in order to lessen feelings of isolation and failure as parents. Many of them had used parenting apps or were a part of online groups in order to find support that fit their busy and unpredictable schedules. They appreciated having a variety of parenting resources.

We came to the conclusion that the reason that attendance had fallen off at Encompass’s free parenting classes was because the timing was as inconvenient for most parents as was the admission of failure that parents seemed felt by attending.

process: Now What?

Now that we had created a series of relatable personas for our clients at Encompass, we had to use these personas to think of a solution to our client’s original ask: “How might we enhance our understanding of our communities’ needs in order to better serve them through our free programs for children and families?”

Our next brainstorming session as a team was all about thinking of an easy-to-implement solution for Encompass to use that would reach more of the families in their area. We started by reminding ourselves of the four themes shared by the parents that we had spoken with:

1. Community Support

2. Failure/Judgement

3. Technology

4. Time/ Scheduling conflicts

We came up with three solutions that we thought addressed all of these concerns:

Process: Present to Stakeholders

I helped the team to put together a brief presentation outlining our findings, and the reasons for our recommendations of a parents’ networking group, and AMA, or a series of podcasts. We met up with our key stakeholders at Encompass’s office in order to review all of our materials.

Our stakeholders were surprised at some of our findings, such as to discover the opinion that people resisted going to parenting classes because of not wanting to feel judged by others. However, they were very receptive to our assessment, and after some deliberation, decided that the solution they thought would best meet the needs of their community was to create a podcast. We agreed to deliver a how-to manual by the end of our engagement, and looked for the podcast to launch in the summer of 2019.