The Lab team has been hard at work applying design thinking principles to address the complexity of our problem statement, “working better together to advance station membership and donations.” This post will explore our process — from research study, to brainstorming and on to prototyping — and we’ll let you know how you can join us for our upcoming Demo Day showcasing our prototypes.

Embarking on a process to discover better ways of working together throughout the NPR-Member station network was a daunting task, and we knew that seeking input outside of our own expertise would be key to generating ideas rooted in evidence rather than assumptions.

We approached our research study with the focus of interviewing to fundraising and fundraising-adjacent professionals from NPR headquarters and Member stations from a variety of geographic locations, station sizes, and formats. Prompting our interviewees with non-leading questions about their experiences working with NPR, allowing us to get the best information possible and dig deeper to truly understand the challenges at hand. We also talked with NPR staff about their experiences working with stations. Here’s an overview of what we heard:

• Fundraising-related information being sent from NPR to Member stations is not always getting directly to its primary users, it is being passed along through forwarded emails or third-party listservs.
• Existing fundraising processes between NPR and Member stations related to membership are largely transactional, such as requesting event talent or custom promo spots.
• When it comes to NPR and Member Stations working together, personal relationships — usually based on having met in person — get things done. This is crucial as getting even small things done together seems to build trust.
• Neither stations nor NPR know what to expect of each other when it comes to fundraising. For example, station staff don’t look to NPR for guidance on membership, which is frequently the largest station revenue stream. When it comes to collaborating with stations, NPR’s Development division focuses on major gifts.
• Capacity to leverage data and tools varies greatly across Member stations.
• There is a strong willingness to “work together” on all sides, but there are varying capacities or appetites to commit time, money, and people.

Using these insights, we set out to generate ideas for tools and practices that could help make progress on building trust and goodwill, help fundraisers connect to NPR and to one another, making communication more efficient and how to better represent stations on NPR digital properties.

Our team came back together in-person at NPR HQ in D.C. and used a number of design thinking exercises to conduct brainstorming sessions. This resulted in 200+ sticky notes full of different ideas focused on answering the questions raised from the key insights of our research study.

Of those 200+ ideas lovingly, albeit hastily, scribbled on sticky notes, we knew we couldn’t build prototypes for every single one of them. We held a round of “dot-voting” where each member of the lab could affirm which ideas they thought were closest to achievable in terms of building a prototype to present at the end of the lab.

Then, we plotted the ideas on matrices to evaluate viability, feasibility and desirability to determine the highest areas of impact.

The core question we are trying to answer: What practical ideas would get NPR and Member stations to a point where we are working really well together, and as a result, more revenue is generated through by member stations throughout the system?

While our research study helped us get to brainstorming, we wanted to include even more perspectives as we refined our top ideas. We had that chance at the Super-Regional in New Orleans, where we asked the station and NPR leaders in attendance to weigh in on potential solutions for the key challenges we heard about in our study.

I’m sure you’re on the edge of your seat at this point — and our team is hard at work creating tools, practices, and ideas for how we might begin to figure out how NPR and Member stations can work better together. Your chance to see and hear all about our work is fast approaching!

The Rotation 2 team presented our recommendations on Thursday, November 21 at 3 PM ET, which you can view using this link. Contact us at incubationlab@npr.org with any questions.

Putting Research Into Action: Brainstorming & Prototyping was originally published in Public Radio Incubation Lab on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Back in June, applications for Rotation 2 of the Public Radio Incubation Lab opened up. The theme focus for this rotation is: Working better together to advance station memberships and donations. What does that mean? Well — we’ve been working on figuring that out!

A differentiation between this rotation and the first one is that we have three Member station representatives participating, as compared to one station participant in round 1. The equal split between NPR staff and member station staff aligns with the idea of this group focusing on “working better together.” While we may not know exactly what “working better together” looks like, we know that a strong foundation for the entire public radio system is essential to bringing quality public radio to our communities.

The lab is an opportunity to step away from our perspectives and roles. To that end, for us, “we” refers to the lab itself and not to NPR or a Member Station. We hope this allows us to be as objective, empathetic and efficient as possible in working our problem statement.

We’ve been working on dissecting the problem statement we were given as the theme for the lab, which involves a great deal of whiteboard brainstorming and sticky notes.

The first two weeks have involved a lot of learning and exploration of design thinking and how to conduct effective research, but we don’t want to do anything in a vacuum. We want to hear from you on what the problem statement “working better together to advance station membership and donations” means to you. You can email all the lab participants at IncubationLab@npr.org, or you can just leave a comment below. We’re always open to feedback, ideas and more — reach out, even if it is just to say hello.

It is also probably good to introduce to who “we” are — without further ado, here’s a little bit about each participant in Rotation 2.

Rotation 2 Lab Team Members

• Chad Lampe | Station Manager, WKMS
  At WKMS (Murray State University), Chad runs a small and scrappy shop in Murray, Ky., that believes in the universal service mission of public media and is committed to serving its rural region. He believes small stations’ collective success hinges on collaborations inside and outside of public media. Given his experience in multiple collaboratives, he is hopeful that he can offer unique value to this initiative.
• Elyse Poinsett | Director of Marketing and Brand Management, WHYY
  Elyse wants more nonprofits to embrace marketing as an accelerator of impact and sustainability. Before coming to public media about six years ago, she worked in fundraising and marketing in the non-profit arts sector.
• Kjerstin Wood | Digital Fundraising Officer, KUOW
  Kjerstin is a first-generation college graduate and has focused her passion for storytelling and digital media into supporting various nonprofit and public media organizations. She is driven by a deep commitment to supporting independent, nonprofit media, and is dedicated to ensuring media organizations have a strong foundation of support for years to come.
• Noah Carnahan | Software Engineer, Digital Media, NPR
  Noah works on APIs, station tools, and audience data. Previously, he developed mobile platforms for health care workers in developing countries.
• Kaytee Nesmith | Senior Product Designer, Digital Media, NPR
  Kaytee researches and articulates complexities affecting both NPR and Member station staff (and, ultimately, designs solutions to untangle them). Prior to joining NPR, Kaytee served as UX Lead for the Marriott booking app.
• Cp Richardson | Scrum Master, Digital Media, NPR
  Cp is relatively new to NPR, joining in Feb 2019. He spent the previous 7 ½ years at Capital One, most recently with their machine learning teams as a scrum master. He currently works on NPR’s Podcast Team. Additionally, Cp is a board member of The Community Idea Stations’ “Project Amplify” initiative, which focuses on connecting with the next generation of public media consumers.

Introducing Rotation 2 of the Public Radio Incubation Lab was originally published in Public Radio Incubation Lab on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.