Pitching for Foster Care
How we catered different stories about the same concepts
The experience design process revolves around humans. Of course, some of those humans are the users. We’re honing in on their wants and needs. We’re designing to create better experiences for them. We’re making impactful solutions that could potentially do good in the world, especially with our semester topic of adoption and foster care.
However, another important group to consider is the client. Aside from catering to their project specs, wants, and limitations, you also need to be able to explain how the concept fits in with the goals of that project.
That’s where pitches come in. Pitches are the stories of your concepts. They’re what captivate your audience. They’re how you convey and sell your wildest ideas to an unexpecting client.
No matter how brilliant your idea is, it’s ineffective unless you can clearly articulate it.
The bottom line: Pitches get things done.
Throughout our time in MassArt’s Design Innovation graduate program, we’re constantly practicing the art of pitching from business and design points of view. While the overarching structures might vary between the two, we’ve recognized one crucial rule for delivering a successful pitch:
Know your audience.
Know who you’re presenting to. What are their interests? What might they already know? Why are they here listening to you?
These are just some of the questions we asked ourselves when preparing to present our final concepts for this semester’s project over foster care, and it proved to be a challenge. Why?
Because we had two very different audiences.
The first was our client, a lovely group of social workers who experience the foster care and adoption system every single day. These are passionate people who witness trauma firsthand and, despite this, work diligently to help children in need. They were there to see the concepts we shaped for them during our 15-week design sprint.
The second consisted of design thinkers and MassArt students at the Service Design Network’s “Teaching Service Design” event. A majority of them knew just as little about foster care and adoption as we initially did. They were there to learn about how we were applying service design in an academic setting.
Each audience posed very different backgrounds and motivations. How did we cater to each one?
Let’s find out.
Communicating to Social Workers
We’ve had the honor of talking to these inspiring people throughout the semester. Through hearing touching, emotion-filled stories about their day-to-day work life, we recognized a few considerations to guide us through the creation of our final pitch:
- Social workers have lived the system. This is something we cannot say enough in our article series. When it comes to our client, however, this means that we don’t have to repeatedly explain how the system works or how complex it is. They already know.
- They’re overworked and understaffed, and we had to make sure our pitch didn’t propose concepts that added to the workload. Working overtime or at odd hours is not unusual. The average social worker juggles around 18 cases, and they also need to take into account school schedules, upcoming weekend events, emergency removals, and parent schedules.
- They have limited resources. This non-profit organization is constantly applying for grants and creating partnerships to better the livelihoods of foster children. Our pitch couldn’t just propose high-tech, expensive technology or time-consuming frameworks. Our pitch had focus on what could be done now in the rocky present and what can be done in an ideal future.
Backcasting
With the above considerations, we presented our concepts on a timeline. The first three concepts were frameworks that could be carried out immediately and built upon existing structures in place. Our fourth concept, personalized technology integration, proposed a new management system developed specifically for the social workers in the future via grants and non-profit organizations.
Building Trust
Before showcasing our solutions, we needed to establish our credibility. We needed to convey the time we took to understand their experiences and that we weren’t creating based on assumptions. We also needed to show them the evidence behind our concepts.
To do this, we started with our design process. Social workers don’t regularly use design thinking terminology. It was our job to not only explain how we got to our concepts but to explain it in a way that was relative. Explaining how we used the “How-Might-We” framework in detail, for example, would have been unnecessary to our story and possibly confusing.
Our pitch began with setting the context. Rather than pulling every statistic, we found online, we honed in on direct quotes from people. Social workers know first-hand how complicated the system is. However, they might not get the chance to have in-depth discussions with foster and pre-adoptive parents like we did. We wanted to focus on the humans involved in this highly human-centric system.
Going into Detail
The process, though important, was not the star of this pitch. We took a deep dive into the logistics of our solutions. Why did we come to these solutions? How did they work? What did they look like? How do they fit in with the existing system?
We structured our presentation to describe what touch points each concept comes into play. It started with the Event Framework, a concept that revolves around creating interactive, comfortable experiences at what is often the first time pre-adoptive parents interact with foster children and vice versa.
Our presentation continued to Welcome Framework, targetting the first introduction between pre-adoptive parents and a child after the lengthy training process has been completed.
The third concept, our optimization framework, addressed everyday interactions between social workers and how using Google for Non-Profit can help avoid communication gaps and ultimately, speed up the adoption process for children.
The pitch ended with our concept for the future: personalized technology integration. This involved the parent-social worker interactions via a project management system and system for parents to know where they were in the process real-time. This solution would take the most time and resources to create.
In addition to the pitch, our physical prototypes and digital mockups accompanied our further explanations.
How was presenting to designers different?
This particular Service Design Network revolved around teaching service design. Our presentation had a very similar overarching structure: context, process, solution. However, there are also things to keep in mind when presenting to designers:
- Designers know the design process. They understand what it means to talk to users, to pull insights, to brainstorm and iterate. To go into detail about the methodology would be time wasted.
- Foster care and adoption is a unique space to design for, and these people were here to see how we were applying our lessons in service design. For this project, we were stepping away from consumerism and diving into a complex realm full of trauma, emotions, government regulations, and more. It’s not your everyday service design project.
- People are more familiar with media portrayals of the system, not the real deal. Aside from dramatized, inaccurate media depictions, the foster care system is one that not very many people are familiar with. With this presentation, we had to not only hone in user insights as we did with social workers. We had to provide basic truths about the system.
- We had a time constraint. Unlike our pitch to social workers, we had a strict limit of 15 minutes to communicate our use of service design. This meant we had to decide what information was important to convey our message.
These considerations led us to showcase two things: 1) how we addressed such a complex system through service design and 2) what the outcomes of each step were in relation to our methodology.
To convey our process, we used the familiar to introduce the unfamiliar.
We started with a story.
We asked the audience to imagine themselves on the hunt for caffeine after leaving their office or studio at 2 A.M. We painted the picture of a late night at McDonalds, from the bored teenager manning the counter to the smell of stale fries in the air.
Everything sounded as it should be…. Until we introduced an exhausted woman and fearful child sitting at the last booth. We pulled inspiration from a recent Boston Globe series and depicted how social workers sometimes end up at places like McDonalds at 2 A.M., unable to find a bed for the child they just rescued from an unstable household.
We used stories throughout.
As my cohort Stephanie wrote in the previous article, we also made sure to honor people’s voices. Throughout our presentation, we sprinkled in the stories we heard through direct quotes and statistics to both educate the audience and recreate those nights we left class feeling overwhelmed with emotion.
We then brought the context into detail, taking our time to explain why 9,200 children are currently in the Massachusetts foster care system, how the opioid crisis is affecting that, and what all this means in relation to social workers, pre-adoptive parents, adoptive parents, and existing structures. Us students were familiar with “welcome books” and “MAPP training”, for example, but to someone outside the system, those may be completely new terms.
A Timely Presentation
This presentation had a 15-minute time limit and centered around the application of the design process. Rather than providing in-depth explanations about how our concepts worked, we chose to provide a high-level explanation of our concepts and provide a sneak peek of the one service designers would be most interested in: the event framework.
This concept is all about service, and ultimately, the decision came back to the principle of knowing your audience.
What now?
While our semester project has come to an end, there is still so much work to be done within the foster care and adoption system. Our proposed concepts have so much room for iteration and improvement.
We know that we’ve barely scratched the surface throughout these past 15 weeks. It’s our hope that this Medium series has done more than take you through our design journey. We’ve created this series to bring more awareness to the complexities of foster care and adoption, to share the stories we’ve heard, and to showcase how design thinking can be used for positive change in the world.
Thank you for going through this journey with us! Check out our other projects under MassArt’s Design Innovation page.
