In partnership with the non-profit, Smart GEN Society, a team of nine other Scott Scholars and I went through a design thinking process similar to that taught at the Stanford d.school/Institute of Design. Smart GEN Society (SGS) is a nonprofit organization that strives to impact people in our community to make good decisions in today’s digital age. SGS was founded by Amie Konwinski, a military veteran and mother of five, whose passion is to make a difference by informing students, parents, and teachers about the dangers of social media.
We used design thinking in order to determine what part of our partner’s organization could improve and, ultimately, help them more successfully carry out Amie’s mission for SGS. We began by first interview her core team and empathizing with their struggles in order to determine what the most major “pain point” was shared by the core of the organization. We determined that their overarching pressing issue was having monetary support. This was the baseline that SGS needed solidified in order to further develop their brand and spread their message. As such, we kept digging for something that would help solidify this baseline and discovered that the data that they collect is a major part in both business and message. Our solution was to have a data analytics program for the organization to utilize—its goal is to save time in their analytics process and to ease the process of creating a visually stimulating, yet comprehensive, presentation with said data for donors, parents, school districts, etc.
We used design thinking in order to determine what part of our partner’s organization could improve and, ultimately, help them more successfully carry out Amie’s mission for SGS. We began by first interview her core team and empathizing with their struggles in order to determine what the most major “pain point” was shared by the core of the organization. We determined that their overarching pressing issue was having monetary support. This was the baseline that SGS needed solidified in order to further develop their brand and spread their message. As such, we kept digging for something that would help solidify this baseline and discovered that the data that they collect is a major part in both business and message. Our solution was to have a data analytics program for the organization to utilize—its goal is to save time in their analytics process and to ease the process of creating a visually stimulating, yet comprehensive, presentation with said data for donors, parents, school districts, etc.
Furthermore, we began development on a data collection and presentation tool/application for Amie to have on hand for her presentations to students. This application is currently in development in Swift for iOS devices, with features including social media handles, an interactive social media to help make a point in presentations, an integrated survey capability, and further capability for students and parents to see SGS statistics and their graphical representations throughout different demographics.
As a team, we worked extremely efficiently and proactively. Many members of our team were sold on Amie’s mission with SGS from the very beginning, myself included, which helped drive the motivation to put honest effort and care into the design thinking process for SGS. Personally, I developed skills I did not foresee at the beginning of our work with SGS. I have learned how to more efficiently and professionally manage teams from taking minutes of meetings to driving the meetings on a personal level with the team and coordinating efforts in and outside of such.
See the GitHub Repository for the Data Analysis and Visualization Tool here