Designing the First Step
Turning a broad growth brief into a student engagement strategy for a wildlife conservation nonprofit
TYPE
Client Research & Strategy Project
CLIENT
Creature Conserve, a nonprofit connecting artists, writers, and scientists for wildlife conservation
TEAM
Graduate studio team, MassArt MDes Integration Lab
ROLE
Client Coordinator, Research & Synthesis
OUTCOME
Two-track student engagement strategy with an implementation playbook, presented to client leadership for pilot
TIMELINE
8 months, two phases
METHODES
. Comparative Analysis
· Futures Scanning
· Stakeholder Interviews
· Personas
· Co-Creation Workshops
· Concept Validation
· Service Strategy
. Service Blueprinting
THE STRATEGIC CHALLENGE
Creature Conserve brings artists, writers, and scientists together around wildlife conservation. It runs mentorships, workshops, exhibits, and scholarships, and it has a large following online.
The brief we received was wide: find new funding and grow the audience. A brief that wide is a trap. A small team can give a shallow answer about everything or a useful answer about one thing.
So the first real decision of the project was choosing what to focus on. Our research pointed to one audience worth betting on: students and educators in art and science. The second phase turned that bet into a strategy the client could actually run.
_edited.jpg)
MY ROLE
.jpg)
This was a group project, run like a small agency with a real client.
I was the Client Coordinator. I was the single point of contact between the client and the team. I ran the weekly communication, set up and led client meetings, kept the feedback documents both sides worked from, and brought the client's feedback back to the team clearly, even when it was hard to hear.
I also worked on the research and strategy itself. I helped plan the interviews, recruit participants, and run a co-creation session with students. The synthesis happened together, on whiteboards and in roundtable sessions, and I was part of all of it.
IMG2. Synthesis happened on the wall. Roundtable sessions and whiteboard mapping turned raw research into insights.
Eight months, two phases. The research phase chose the audience. The design phase built and validated the strategy.
RESEARCH
RESEARCH APPROCH
The research phase ran four streams at the same time, then let the findings narrow the focus.
COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS
We studied peer organizations working where art meets conservation, and scored each one on storytelling, partnerships, reach, membership, and programs.
FUTURES SCANNING
Each of us looked for signals that could change conservation over the next decade and scored them for impact and credibility. My scans covered machine learning in wildlife conservation and a museum program that used art to reach everyday audiences. One thing this surfaced: Creature Conserve works with scientists and ecologists today, but the technology side of conservation was wide open for partnerships.
PROGRAM OBSERVATION
We sat in on a live Creature Conserve workshop to watch how people actually behaved in it. Participants picked a topic they cared about, heard a short talk, then spent ten minutes finding scholarly articles about it. The workshop was teaching artists how to find and read science. That told us something important: the organization's real product is the collaboration process itself.
INTERVIEW DESIGN AND RECRUITMENT
We wrote the screener and interview guide for educators and students, then reached out to biology, ecology, marine science, and art faculty across Boston-area schools.
THE RESEARCH PLAN
NARROWING THE RESEARCH QUESTIONS
Our first plan covered four audiences: current participants, the social media audience, peer organizations, and educators and students. It was thorough, and it was too much.
The client said so directly. Their board reviewer is a researcher herself, and her feedback was blunt: she would not trust findings about any group based on fewer than eight interviews with that group. Spreading a handful of interviews across four audiences would give us stories, not evidence.
We pushed back once. Then we looked at our own recruiting numbers and admitted she was right.
Over three revisions, the plan narrowed to one audience: educators and students in art and science, with interviews split evenly across both sides.
We chose this group for a reason beyond reachability. Educators multiply. One faculty member who brings Creature Conserve into a class brings the whole classroom with them. None of the other audiences had that.
WHAT THE COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS FOUND
The comparative analysis conclude that the Creature Conserve has no middle.
People know about it's existance. The organization scored 8 out of 10 on global reach, matching or beating most of the peer set. It scored lowest on, at 4 out of 10, for storytelling, the site is commercial in tone and carries no origin story, while the strongest storyteller in the set opens with the history of how it began. Partnership power showed the same shape.
Every peer scored high or medium-high; Creature Conserve scored low-medium, with partners named in the annual report. Beyond these they also ranked low on retaining the audience making it structural weakness. Creature Conserve's programs: mentorship, scholarships, workshops, art direction, all ask for real commitment. Its largest group, a social media audience that follows the work and has never joined a program, because of their busy schedules and lack of commitment. It was not a marketing problem. There was genuinely nothing for them to do.
INSIGHTS FROM STUDENTS AND EDUCATORS
With the audience chosen, we ran one-on-one interviews with art students, science students, and educators on both sides. We also ran co-creation sessions in a college classroom to test our thinking with real students.
What they told us was consistent:
Art and science students want to work together, but there is no clear way to do it.
Students are willing, but they need help taking the first step. They want to know where to start and what to make.
When something is left fully to students, ownership slips and it becomes casual.
Educators are the bridge. They want to make collaboration feel less overwhelming, but they cannot find the right opportunities for their students.
Students do their best work on topics they can relate to. Local and tangible beats global and abstract.
Recognition matters. Students show up for portfolio pieces, prizes, exhibitions, and connections that help their future.
"We are ready to contribute or collaborate with people, but then we need all the resources. You need to give us the material, you need to give us the inspiration."
— Student, co-creation session
SYNTHESIS
WHO WE DESIGNED FOR
We turned the interviews into four personas, each built from real quotes: an art student, a science student, an art educator, and a science educator. Together they cover both sides of the collaboration and both roles in it, the participant and the bridge.
The art student wants her work to matter but does not know where to start. The science student believes science plus creativity means more impact, but he is trained to be technical and cannot find people who think like him. The art educator wants to connect her students' work to the real world. The science educator wants ways to make technical topics relatable.
All four asked for the same thing in different words: a place where working across disciplines is possible and easy, with real support behind it.
PERSONA VALUE PROPORTIONS
ART STUDENT
"Empower myself to use the power of art to positively influence the world around me."
SCIENCE STUDENT
"I seek a unified platform with enhanced resources and institutional support for conservation efforts."
ART EDUCATOR
"Connect what my students are learning to the real world and ignite my students' interest in conservation."
SCIENCCE EDUCATOR
"Empower students to engage in sustainability, drive actionable change, and foster meaningful collaborations."
INSIGHTS TO CONCLUSION
Every part of the final strategy traces back to something a participant said. We held that line on purpose. The fastest way to lose a client's trust is to show them a concept they cannot connect to their own users.
REFRAMING THE BRIEF
The brief asked how to grow funding and audience. The research said the growth engine is students, and that students need three things the organization was not giving them: a first step sized for them, structure that creates ownership, and recognition that counts toward their goals.
That gave the design phase its question.
PROBLEM STATEMENT
HOW MIGHT ...
Creature Conserve build and sustain collaboration led by students from diverse backgrounds that supports wildlife conservation?
'Student-led' because they are struggling with top to bottom. 'Sustain' because student bodies turn over every year
Both words in that question carry weight. "Student-led" because top-down programming had already been tried and had failed. "Sustain" because students graduate every year, so anything we built had to outlive the people who started it.
The question also changed where we looked. Students do not meet an organization alone. They meet it through friends, professors, and campus offices, and each of those can open a door or close one. So the strategy had to put Creature Conserve inside that campus world, not outside it calling in.
IDEATION
Before pitching anything, we put every idea on the wall and sorted them by how soon Creature Conserve could realistically run them. Nine ideas in total, from a conservation curriculum that educators could pick up right away to a multi-school hackathon that would take years to build toward.Sorting by time made the trade-off easy to see. The ideas that could launch fastest were not the ones with the widest reach, and the biggest ideas needed relationships the organization did not have yet.
TESTING CONCEPTS
We then ran every idea through the same four questions, one actor at a time. Who does what. What they already have. What they would still need. What they get out of it.
This exposed the ideas that only worked on paper. If a column came back mostly empty, that person had no reason to show up. An idea that depends on someone with no reason to show up is not a strategy.
CLIENT PUSHED BACK THAT HELPED
The design phase was a loop: pitch, feedback, rebuild. The client engaged deeply, and their feedback changed the work twice.
Round ONE
We pitched a set of concepts including a student social media showcase, internships, and school partnerships. The client liked the showcase most. Then they told us something we needed to know: they had already tried a version of it. Paid artists used to curate "theme weeks" and take over the organization's Instagram. It had not worked.
Round TWO
We rebuilt the concept around ownership. We also tested the direction with real students in a co-creation session with a sustainability class. The students confirmed what the research had said: they were willing, but they needed the first step handed to them, topics they could relate to, and rewards worth their limited time.
The RESOLUTION
Fully student-led drifts into casualness. Fully organization-led turns into scripted content that nobody owns. So the final strategy refused to pick one. It pairs a student-led track with an administration-led track, and each one covers the other's weakness.
THE STORY OF FAILED FIRST VERSION
The client asked us to work out why the first version had failed before we designed a replacement. So we went through it piece by piece.
The artists who took over the account weren't always available, so the takeovers turned into posts scheduled ahead of time. That removed the live back-and-forth, and the content ended up feeling scripted. People liked the posts, but that was as far as it went.
Nobody started making and sharing their own work. Running it also took a lot of staff time, so the organization was spending a lot and getting very little community back.
Those four problems became our checklist. Anything we designed after that had to give students real ownership, have a structure holding it up, count success by what people made rather than what they looked at, and be cheap enough to keep running.
STRATEGY
Track ONE
Creature Conserve Student Clubs. Student-led.
Volunteer student leaders start campus clubs with Creature Conserve's training, tools, and programs behind them. Clubs run workshops, field activities like guided bird walks with scientists from the organization's network, speaker events, and their own social media. The year ends with a showcase, and outgoing leaders train the next group so the club survives graduation.
The final recommendation gives Creature Conserve two coordinated tracks into universities.
The tracks solve each other's failure mode. Clubs create authentic peer energy but risk casualness. Ambassadors create accountability and continuity but cost money. Together, structure holds the energy in place.
Track TWO
Student Ambassadors.
Administration-led.
A paid campus role created together with the university. We validated this with MassArt's Center for Art and Community Partnerships, which already runs exactly this model: outside organizations partner with the center to create paid student roles, funded through center grants, Federal Work Study, or the organization itself. The ambassador organizes events, builds the art-science community on campus, and keeps the relationship with the school steady while club members come and go.
HOW THE TWO TRACKS WORK
Both tracks were specified as services, not slogans, with responsibilities split by actor at every stage.
The club service, stage by stage. Students lead the visible work; the organization carries the structure. Stage five is the one that matters most: the club has to outlive the students who started it.
The ambassador service. The third lane is why this is a strategy and not a wish: the campus office already knows how to fund and run this role.
WHY IT HOLDS
Programs that only serve one side stall. This one gives each side something it cannot get alone. Students get a way in, portfolio work, a network across disciplines, and recognition. Creature Conserve gets outreach that grows itself, traffic into its existing programs, and lasting relationships with institutions instead of individuals.
READY TO BE PILOTED
We handed the client a playbook, not a poster of ideas:
-
A five-stage club rollout: recruit, onboard, launch, promote, and sustain, with responsibilities split between the organization and student leaders at every stage.
-
A cost comparison for both tracks, covering staffing, marketing, program development, and pay, so the board could see what each track really takes before committing.
-
A pilot map: Massachusetts and Rhode Island universities with both art and science programs, with target majors listed on both sides.
-
Promotion concepts built from what students told us works: QR codes instead of walls of text, local topics, and visible recognition for participants.
-
Success measures across four areas: program participation, social media growth, student retention at six months, and work produced by students.
Costed before it was recommended, so the board could weigh both tracks before committing.
Twenty-four institutions identified across Massachusetts and Rhode Island, with target majors on both sides. Start with one, prove it, then scale.
Promotion concepts built from student input: QR codes, local events, and visible recognition.
OUTCOMES
We presented the final strategy and playbook to Creature Conserve's leadership at the end of the project, with clear next steps: connect with the campus partnerships office we had validated, find faculty allies, and start with one pilot before scaling.
The strategy stands on a mechanism that already works. Because we checked the ambassador role against a real campus office that already funds and runs roles like it, the recommendation was not a drawing of an idea. It was a role with a known path to existing.
The project also built relationships that outlasted it. Creature Conserve's leadership accepted an invitation to give a keynote at MassArt's Design Week. A faculty member we interviewed joined our final presentation to support the direction. Those relationships were part of the deliverable too.
The team closed the project 25% under its planned hours.
The pilot itself was scoped to run after our engagement ended, so this case study ends at the handoff: a validated strategy, a playbook, and an organization that knows what to do next.
PERSONAL LEARNINGS
01.
Scope research against reality, not curiosity
Our first plan covered four audiences because more felt safer. The client's reviewer challenged it, and our own recruiting numbers proved her right. One audience studied properly gave us more than four studied thinly ever could. I now plan research around what can actually be recruited.
02.
A failed prototype is a gift.
The client's abandoned theme weeks taught us more than any single interview. They showed us exactly how this kind of idea fails. Designing against a documented failure is faster and more honest than designing from imagination.
03.
The coordinator seat is a strategy seat
Sitting between the client and the team meant I heard the pushback first, before anyone softened it. The temptation in that seat is to cushion the feedback. The useful version of the job is the opposite: bring it back sharp, because the sharp version is what forced our best pivot.
A graduate studio project with Creature Conserve through the MassArt MDes Integration Lab. Thank you to the Creature Conserve leadership for engaging so generously with the work.
VA Red Coat
Home