Teaching an IT organization what ‘belonging’ means to its members

the client’s Challenge

An international organization of IT professionals, ISACA, sought to better understand the needs and motivations of their members in order to attract and retain the next generation.

OUr Design challenge

How will we get participants to speak to nuanced feelings of belonging and map insights to inform our client’s strategy?

My role

Lead Researcher

The Team

Project Manager, Lead Designer

Activities and Deliverables

Interviews, concept testing, synthesis, insights and recommendations document

Timeline

4 months

Values assumptions

We devised an interview strategy to help people to describe something that can be hard to put into words. Using outputs from stakeholder interviews we identified 4 values the leadership associated with membership: Access, Credibility, Community and Flexibility. We asked interview participants to rank each of these in terms of what was most important to them at this moment in their career and where they would have the organization invest further.

Concept testing

We next showed participants seven concepts we’d brainstormed and mocked up. These concepts each corresponded to a value. We asked participants to give feedback on each concept - would they use it? Why or why not? This helped us understand the kinds of connection members were looking for from the organization.

A new view of engagement

When looking at membership data across a range of engagement levels it can be tempting to think in terms of a funnel, where the goal is pushing people toward deeper levels of engagement. However our research showed that people’s careers don’t follow that pattern. Careers ebb and flow and for an organization to successfully support professionals, it should instead meet people where they are.

A holistic view of community

Our goal, from a recommendations standpoint, was to make it easier for people to pass through different ‘layers’ of engagement: if people were authentically motivated to become more involved with the organization, how could the organization best enable that energy?

building conviction internally

ISACA’s CEO resonated deeply with our research outputs and was eager for the rest of the organization to get the benefit of our perspective. Our final deliverable was shared at ISACA’s annual strategic planning meeting and was the basis for setting next year’s biggest priorities.

A foundation for ongoing member insights

As a result of our engagement, ISACA undertook complete overhaul of their backend database systems so that they could better understand how their member cohorts were spread out across various modalities.