Marrying engagement and data, the alumni program we redeveloped makes resources accessible to small business owners and improves the overall program through user feedback.

The Approach

Listening and Learning

At Starling, we strive to always practice active listening so that we can base our strategy in the community that we serve.

No matter how compelling the idea, a twelve week program for a few hundred participants in four different locations takes a lot of teamwork. And that meant identifying, listening to, and getting buy-in from key stakeholders, such as the academic teams at the community college, the existing program staff, and the program’s alumni.

The first part of our process included interviews with end users, community college partners, and industry experts. This informed our pilot: it addressed four markets, each with a different set of local partners. We also learned about unique challenges that informed the program design, such as:

• Improving interviews, from presentation to preparation
• Using SMS to engage students, vs email to reach alumni
• Incorporating program messaging into existing resources from the career services team

Once we had our data, we set a plan to build a community among the four markets, strategize communications, oversee communications, run weekly meetings, and support local innovation and experimentation within a national framework.

Our listening wasn’t just for our initial stages: throughout our process, we built and ran surveys for the alumni from the intake to mid-program to post-program so that we could track our results, adjust our plan, and analyze the results for future learnings.

One of the key components that Starling values in executing any program is the digital infrastructure to not only support a program – but also its durability and growth. Working through rapid iterations, Starling built portals to solicit and review internship applications using no-code solutions, established the architecture to manage participant data, created a cadence for digital communications to participants, and managed surveys, feedback collection, and analysis.

Our work in documentation and data structuring enabled our client’s team to continue the alumni program. In the long run, with this work, we empowered the team to only maintain but also change their technology and processes as the program evolved.

Relationships endure

At Starling, we pride ourselves on building effective solutions which are based in our constant connection to a community’s members.

Beyond the initial user and stakeholder interviews we ran, we supported virtual trainings and community building events for students and business owners and stayed in touch with the community college teams on the ground.

In sum, these connections also enabled us to bring valuable stories to the client’s marketing, PR, and government affairs teams to support the company’s brand. Ultimately, our communications work helped them make the most out of the incredible work they were already investing in but not taking advantage of.