Giving Compass' Take:

• Nonprofit leaders can utilize human-centered design to promote civic engagement and advocacy to increase services for constituents. 

• Human-centered design is drawing from constituents' lived experiences to create products or services. How would nonprofits apply this design process to social sector work?

• Read about how philanthropy can use human-centered design and systems-minded design models.

For many direct service nonprofits, promoting civic engagement and advocacy has begun to emerge as a greater priority. But as an add-on to existing and often underfunded programming work, it can seem like a stretch. Many organizations just don’t have the bandwidth or expertise they need to succeed.

Community Resources Exchange (CRE), saw this new interest—organizations’ desire to be part of something larger—come to the fore during two workshops we facilitated on risk and resilience. During the workshops, and in pre-workshop surveys completed by 50-plus nonprofit leaders, participants identified three opportunities their organization can pursue.

Once organizations recognize these priorities, the question becomes: How do organizations pursue them when they are already under strain just running their own programs? The answer is human-centered design (HCD)—the process of walking in our constituents’ shoes and drawing from their lived experience as inspiration for product or service design.

There is a framework called journey mapping that draws on the “5Es” widely deployed in the field of user experience (UX)— that allows participants to map the experience of the group they define as their target population:

  • Entice: How do constituents first find out about your work? What are they feeling, fearing, or wanting at that moment?
  • Enter: What are their experiences of “signing up” for a program or their first interaction with your organization? Who do they talk to and where?
  • Engage: What’s their “first-use” and/or sustained experience of the program? What are their highlights and challenges?
  • Exit: What’s the moment when they either leave or return again? Who do they talk to?
  • Extend: What do they tell others about their experience of your organization? How can they support the reach or scale of your work?

Read the full article about using human-centered design to advance civic engagement by Fiona Karagasingam at Stanford Social Innovation Review.