What we Do

We believe that institutions have the power to delight the people they serve – they just need the right mix of vision, process, and expertise. This belief is reflected in what we do and how we do it:

• We help organizations come up with ways to better engage their audiences.
• We use an audience-centered approach to create engaging strategies and experiences.
• We use robust and field-tested methods.
• We incorporate expertise from many fields.
• We use a modular process that can be mixed and matched based on your needs.

We help organizations come up with ways to better engage their audiences.

To us, engagement equals interaction – interaction with a technology, a brand, a government agency, a product, a service, a space, a cause, or with other people.

Designing these interactions to be engaging and meaningful for people is at the core of what we do.

We use an audience-centered approach to create engaging strategies and experiences.

We believe that the most engaging projects are those that tap into the needs, desires, behaviors, and motivations of their intended audience.

However, it is not enough to only focus on what our audiences want and need. It is critical to tap into the mission and capacities of the organization as well as to be aware of and sensitive to the external context.

It is this mixed perspective that gives us insight into the projects that will work best in your particular context.

We use robust and field-tested methods.

We do not get caught up in the latest buzz words or trends. We create bespoke research and strategy development plans for our clients based on the best and most appropriate research and strategy development tools available.

We developed the Experience Hacking lab to experiment with process and bring the best research and strategy development tools to our client work.

We incorporate expertise from many fields.

Our network of experts – from from architects and anthropologists to web developers and graphic designers – allows us to create and implement holistic engagement strategies in a variety of mediums:

• Communications + Social Media – includes marketing, grassroots campaigns, grasstops campaigns, brand identities, and other projects that help organizations better communicate and work with their audiences on an ongoing basis.
• Events – includes conferences, meetups, unconferences, subsidiary events, presentation schedules, and any other isolated instance in time where people are brought together for a specific purpose.
• Capacity Building – including training plans, staffing plans, organizational redesign, fundraising, performance management, and other projects that help organizations build the capacity to serve their audiences in more engaging ways.
• Technology – including hardware, software, websites, applications, and other pieces of technology that help organizations stay connected with and serve their audiences.
• Service, Program and Policy design – including any interaction between organizations and their audiences.
• Space and the Built Environment – including environmental design, public space, creative placemaking, wayfinding, and other projects that help audiences feel more connected with the spaces in which they spend time.

We use a modular process that can be mixed and matched based on your needs.

• Project Scoping – during this initial phase we help you understand what your needs are, setting you on an efficient strategy development path.
• Discovery – during the discovery phase we conduct all necessary research for your project, which depending on your needs may include desktop studies, ideation sessions, surveys, interviews, persona development, and field observations.
• Synthesis – during the synthesis phase we take all of the research and develop an initial strategic approach based on our findings and project goals.
• Design – during the design phase we produce specific suggestions that will accomplish your goals, fitting within the suggested strategy approach.
• Implementation – during the implementation phase we bring the designs to life.

See our sister site BYO projects for a sample of case studies about our work.