Closing the gap in DiasporaDNA's data loop
Case Study Summary:
DiasporaDNA is a nonprofit aiming to celebrate people of all diasporas through programming and archive projects. Since its inception, DiasporaDNA has struggled to understand the impact its program may have on participants, despite collecting survey data. Like an open loop, DiasporaDNA had the intention to offer high-quality programming and collect data on participant experiences, but the step of using that data was missing. The problem wasn’t a reflection of their capabilities or understanding of data, but rather a structural and sustainability limitation.
As a service design consultant, I worked alongside a team to close that loop. By mapping the existing ecosystem, identifying where data was getting missed, three interventions were proposed to develop a sustainable foundation for continuous learning and organizational growth.
My role
As a service designer, I facilitated group meetings and met critical deadlines, planned and facilitated a co-design workshop activity, analyzed the ecosystem via a transition journey for festival producers and a connection circle of the service, and developed the intervention strategy around data management.
Teammates
Mars Nevada
May Kim
Shreesa Shrestha
Grace Ho
Project Type
Service Design
Tools
Figma
Miro
Timeline
February - May 2025 (2.5 months)
THE PROBLEM
The client, the challenge, and the question worth asking
DiasporaDNA is a Philadelphia-based non-profit cultural center dedicated to celebrating artists across multiple diasporas and fostering "healing through heritage." Founded to honor ancestral legacies and collective memory, the organization serves as a connective hub for the "global majority," bridging the gap between historical archives and educational community programming. Since their inception, they’ve experienced challenges around understanding the impact their programs may have on participants.
Defining the problem
Problem statement
Since DiasporaDNA's inception, they’ve experienced challenges around understanding the impact that their programs may have on participants. This is especially important for securing grant funding.
How might we
How might we leverage existing survey data while also providing opportunities for interventions to better measure impact?
The process
To undertake this project, I followed the design thinking framework to empathize with users before defining a problem to design for. User testing was not included in this project as later discussed in this case study.
understanding the problem
Kickoff: listening first
Client kickoff meeting
Every design project begins by first listening. Our kickoff meeting with DiasporaDNA's founder and president offered an understanding for the full complexity of the challenge.
While collecting participant survey data on various programming was currently conducted, no clear system for analyzing or applying it existed. The data lived in separate physical and digital survey forms, affording difficulty with pulling data on program impact and impact stories that grant funders want to hear. Although DiasporaDNA had intention behind the data collection, and understood what good data could bring to their grant writing efforts, the infrastructure to support it was missing.
This initial conversation set the premise for everything that followed: DiasporaDNA already care a lot about their programming and participants, but they needed the tools and structure to concretely convey it.
Main takeaway
While DiasporaDNA had an intention behind the data collection and understood what good data could bring to their grant writing efforts, the infrastructure to support it was missing.
Service Blueprint: Mapping Where the Loop Breaks
To truly understand their service, I had to understand it completely.
Working from the kickoff meeting and a review of DiasporaDNA's website and social media, I built a first-pass service blueprint mapping.
A service blueprint allowed me to map DiasporaDNA's operations across front-stage interactions (what participants experience), backstage actions (what staff and organizers do behind the scenes), and supporting processes (the software and platforms holding it all together). Extensive consideration is placed in mapping out the customer journey as well, where key phases serve as part of DiasporaDNA programming.
An important early assumption was that after attending a workshop, participants would automatically converted to returning participants and donors. This would be corrected in our second iteration.
A second attempt at the service blueprint paints a clearer picture around data
The second service blueprint was developed in partnership with our client’s Impact Director in a co-design workshop (discussed later), where the following customer journey steps surfaced: getting reminders of the event, checking in, community agreements, recording of participant experiences, and connecting to DiasporaDNA after the event.
Of greatest insight though, was that although DiasporaDNA placed great importance on understanding their program participant’s experience, greater weight was placed keeping the positive energy around connection amongst participants over collecting feedbacks at the end of sessions.
As a result, every workshop ended differently, with some workshops collecting feedback informally through conversation, through Zoom comments, formal feedback paper surveys, or Google Form surveys. When some of the data collected is informal while the rest are spread across digital and physical platforms, developing actionable insights becomes overwhelming and easy to deprioritize.
The service blueprint’s last two stages of the customer journey (wrap-up and follow-up) highlighted these insights as opportunities to organize the data collection process in new methods that would feel natural for staff and participants during workshops, so that grants could become more compelling (see image below, along with a link to the full blueprint).
The blueprint revealed that although the data loop had multiple entry points (both formal and informal), no consistent and concrete method for collection existed. Like an open loop, DiasporaDNA had the intention to offer high-quality programming and collect survey data on participant experiences, but the step of using that data was missing. The problem wasn’t a reflection of their capabilities nor their understanding of data, but rather a limitation in structure and sustainability around it.
A note on scope
Although DiasporaDNA hosts multiple different programs, ranging from art therapy groups, to archival projects, and city bus tours, it was determined to narrow the scope on the remainder of the project to one single program: Think Tank Workshop.
DiasporaDNA’s Think Tank workshop hosts and support current and upcoming individuals interested in hosting festivals, known as festival producers, within the Philadelphia area. Given the number of years it’s been hosted, as well as the client’s extensive understanding of this particular program, all analysis moving forward centered on this, with the idea that many insights could map out to other programs. Moving forward, I will refer to users interchangeably as “producers” or “festival producers”.
Finding opportunities
Mapping where the data loop breaks
Dynamic personas were developed to understand how each stakeholder relates to data in their own ways. A co-design workshop then surfaced where the loop was breaking. The accumulation of these activities led to four key takeaways that mapped onto DiasporaDNA’s data lifecycle framework.
Understanding three DiasporaDNA relationships with data through dynamic personas
Creating dynamic personas helps with empathizing and understanding different people and personas who interact with the service, as well as factors that support or block the service from being it’s best version possible.
Three key dynamic personas are identified: DiasporaDNA staff/volunteers, new festival producers, and returning festival producers.
What became clear through this process was that each stakeholder had very different relationships to data. Participants weren't thinking about data; they were thinking in terms of experience and feeling. Staff were interested in executing logistics and creating an inclusive space, but feel pressure to find more funding to continue their work.
Limited resources, uncertainty, and feeling out of place can make it difficult for each of our personas to have the ideal experience. Suggesting potential interventions to get them to an ideal state was the design opportunity.
While each persona was not directly thinking about data, data itself could support DiasporaDNA in meeting their goals.
While each persona was not directly thinking about data, data itself could support DiasporaDNA to meet each of their goals.
Rather than designing for DiasporaDNA, I wanted to design with them. A co-design workshop brought together organizational stakeholders in a facilitated session to surface what was working, what wasn't, and what was missing.
Over two sessions, I tried to confirm my understanding of DiapsoraDNA as a service, and look for opportunities to integrate user data collection.
Activity 1: Role play Service Walkthrough
Through a role-play walkthrough (which extensively explored the timeline of a workshop) and an interactive role-play activity, I learned more about the existing processes, and surfaced needs and potential solutions through co-creation. We identified what participants and staff were doing or feeling, and where data could be collected throughout the service experience through the service walkthrough.
Our first co-design activity our client to walk us through each step of a Think Tank workshop, and the different data they currently collect (yellow post-its). Blue sticky notes were opportunities proposed and further voted on based on feasibility of implementation
Activity 2: Build a Persona
In a second co-design activity, the client was asked to review the developed personas and create any new personas that may have been missed. From here, it was discovered that DiasporaDNA wanted to continue the tradition of festival producers going, but to do so, it required ensuring the emergence of a new generation of producers.
Our activity uncovered an interest in young adults who are interested in festival life and passionate about learning and taking action. Initial recruitment strategies were discussed around potential campus recruitments, and a fellowship program DiasporaDNA had always wanted but had yet to establish.
Key Takeaways
After the workshop, along with my teammates, we reviewed the current DiasporaDNA workshop process and identified new data collection methods and metrics that could be applied throughout. The team then analyzed these steps with potentials, and grouped our data collection suggestions into four key takeaways:
Takeaway 01
Evaluation needs to fit more naturally into the workshop planning process.
Takeaway 02
Check-in can feel busy and high-energy, making data collection harder.
Takeaway 03
After the workshop, it can be difficult to get participants to complete surveys.
Takeaway 04
Once surveys are collected, there needs to be a clearer process for where the data goes and how it is used.
Closing the loop meant designing for all four takeaways.
This inspired the creation of a data lifecycle map, reflecting the before, during, and after of DiasporaDNA programs.
The interventions
Closing the data loop
With a full picture of DiasporaDNA's ecosystem, its people, and its pain points, our team developed three interventions, designed to address a different layer of the data and impact challenge.
Stage of loop addressed: Before
Intervention 1: Program Evaluation Planning Activity
Before DiasporaDNA could improve how it measures impact, it needed shared clarity around what impact meant to them. The guiding question here was how to empower staff and volunteers to collaboratively plan outcomes and capture impact.
Program Evaluation Planning Activity explained
Based on Logic Models, which are regularly used for grant applications, this facilitated planning activity was designed as a working session template, guiding DiasporaDNA staff through defining program goals and identifying what success looks like. This activity serves as the foundation for understanding the types of data to aim to collect in programs and data-collecting activities moving forward.
Stage of loop addressed: During
Intervention 2: Data Art Toolkit
DiasporaDNA's community engages most deeply through interpersonal connection rather than spreadsheets. If impact data is going to be collected authentically and ethically from participants, it needs to feel like it belongs in the same cultural space as the programming itself. The question therefore, was how do we create alternatives to surveys in moments when surveys would detract from the energy of the experience?
Data Art Toolkit explained
This toolkit of participatory, arts-based data collection prompts and activities can be embedded into DiasporaDNA's existing programming. Through visual reflection activities, word-mapping exercises, and collective storytelling prompts, these methods invite participants to share their experience in ways that feel meaningful and natural rather than extractive. Rather than pausing participants to complete surveys, this activity converts participation into data itself.
Outputs from this toolkit are designed to provide two uses: community artifacts and impact data that can be shared with funders in compelling, human-centered ways.
Stage of loop addressed: After
Intervention 3: Data management platform
Even with better data collection practices in place, DiasporaDNA needed somewhere to put the data and a way to make sense of it over time. Without a central hub for data, insights would continue to live across physical and digital silos. This led to a question around how to equip staff with a simple, structured system for storing and accessing data that directly supports their grant writing and narrative development.
Data management platform explained
A lightweight data management platform tool tailored to DiasporaDNA's capacity and technical comfort level. Rather than prescribing a complex enterprise tool, this intervention identifies intuitive platforms with appropriate features, including easy-to-use survey builders, spreadsheets organizing data by programmatic need, and dashboards for tracking metrics often needed for reports.
Such a tool affords grant writers and program leaders with the ability to quickly come to the platform to pull compelling numbers for evidence-based narratives, rather than hunting across disconnected folders and forms.
Accounting for ripple effects
Anticipating Downstream Effects Before They Become Problems
This exercise reminded us that DiasporaDNA is not a standalone program. It is only part of a much larger ecosystem of cultural production, community healing, and resource distribution. Any intervention we proposed needed to work within and for that ecosystem, not disrupt the relationships and trust that
DiasporaDNA has spent years of effort building up to what they are today. Any intervention we proposed needed to work within and for that ecosystem, so highlighting any potential positive and negative impacts is necessary for future planning together.
Connection Circles
Connecting back to the ecosystem
In service design, no intervention exists in isolation. A connection circle of the DiasporaDNA service allowed our team to map the full web of relationships surrounding the organization. From participants, staff, and donors, to social media promotions, funding, and grants.
This Connection Circle of DiasporaDNA shows how increasing data collection positively impacts grant proposals and an increase in current and new participants (see blue arrow lines in diagram). Referred to as a positive reinforcing loop, this serves as evidence that by targeting interventions towards data, goals around recruiting future festival producers and garnering greater grant funding are possible.
On the other side of the coin, the number of positive reenforcing loops highlights a possible future where relationships between elements create too much demand and pressure on DiasporaDNA actors or systems, such as grant writers, data collection, or staff in general. In such cases, we recommend future planning and strategies such as strategically capping program sizes and events as is sustainable in that future.
Transition Journeys
Using dynamic personas to experience the full data cycle
To understand the lived experience of those running DiasporaDNA's programming, transition journeys were developed for all three personas. These journeys traced their experience from early planning through execution and post-event wrap-up, surfacing the moments of the improvements that our proposed interventions bring, as well as potentially negative impacts on the system. Such scenarios are paired with solutions for DiasporaDNA to consider and plan for.
The staff dynamic persona below shows how their journey could shift from uncertainty and lack of structure in collecting meaningful data, towards a reality full of confidence and evidence. Examples of potentially negative ripples include a sense by staff of a steep learning curve that could consume their energy and time. Proposed solutions to address this include providing examples of success stories and positive encouragement over the possible impact.
Predicting and solving for potential intervention challenges
Considerations for each intervention around predicting and solving for potential challenges were also made.
Intervention 01
Collaborative Evaluation Planning Exercise
Challenges
Shared personal details get photographed and circulated publicly.
Solutions
Verbal norm at check-in: "Be mindful of what others shared when you post."
Intervention 02
Interactive Data Art
Challenges
Exercises could feel tedious or take too much time, especially community needs research.
Solutions
Save prior exercise answers, research stats, and survey questions to draw from in the future.
Intervention 03
Data Management
Challenges
Managing growing datasets and evolving surveys can strain staff capacity.
Solutions
Support staff with data management training and continuous learning opportunities.
Leaving a positive impact on DiasporaDNA’s Future
Together, the three interventions build upon each other. The evaluation planning activity gives staff a shared language for outcomes and a framework that flows directly into grant writing. The data art toolkit turns participation itself into evidence, strengthening community relationships while generating qualitative insights and image-based artwork all at once. And the data management platform ensures that evidence doesn't disappear or go unutilized, but rather, accumulates and becomes the foundation for more compelling grant applications and narrative storytelling for social media promotions and potential donors.
Individually and in combination, these interventions close a gap. Together, they close the pre-existing gaps in the data loop.
Positive Impact
Collaborative Evaluation Planning Exercise
Creating a shared understanding of outcome-based evaluation, custom and specific surveys, and a framework for grant applications.
Positive Impact
Interactive
Data Art
Collaboration will strengthen relationships with each other and DiasporaDNA while providing insights to improve programming
Positive impact
Data
Management
Stronger data leads to more compelling grant applications, demonstrated impact, and increased funder confidence.
In conclusion
Delivering proposed interventions
The pitch
Our final presentation to DiasporaDNA brought together the full arc of this project: from the service blueprint that made the gap in the data loop visible, to the co-design workshop that surfaced what was truly needed, to three interventions designed to work within the real constraints of a mission-driven organization navigating limited resources and meaningful goals.
This message, along with the research findings and recommendations, was conveyed in a final report deck to the UNDL team. To support their long-term website redesign initiative, digital copies of our deck, problem lists, and highlighted videos of user sessions were shared for their own keeping as well.
As a team, we wanted to answer DiasporaDNA’s brief by showing how we could capture impact through data and numbers. These interventions will continue to help DiasporaDNA tell better stories about their programs and workshops, how they change lives, and why they deserve support and funding.
Lessons learned
Go into the kickoff meeting with the right questions.
Kickoff meetings are incredibly valuable for gaining a footing in the context of a new environment. However, one meeting was not enough to fully understand a service, and it shouldn't be treated as such. Being transparent about the fact that we were still learning the system from the beginning, and that alignment would be ongoing throughout the project, ensures that trust is established early on.
Know the constraints before you recommend.
Budget, staff capacity, and existing ecosystem dynamics all shape what's actually implementable. Tools like the service blueprint and connection circle helped surface these constraints early, keeping our recommendations grounded in reality rather than ideal conditions.
Co-design works best when stakeholders are recruited early.
If given more time, involving a wider set of stakeholders, including program participants, volunteers, and additional community partners, from the very beginning of the design process would have deepened both our insights and garnered greater understanding from multiple staff members from DiasporaDNA. The workshop with the present staff really brought buy-in to what could be possible, and creating that experience for everyone would have been incredibly impactful for not only them, but also the design team.
Next Steps
With more time, a social media and recruitment strategy aimed at younger adult participants would be next developed. Doing so would help build a new generation of festival producers and generate a new cohort of data contributors feeding back into the closed loop.
Most importantly, the next phase of this work would involve supporting DiasporaDNA through the implementation of these interventions, walking alongside them as they navigate such change, rather than handing off a deck. Iteration based on real-world use would therefore be where the real design work begins.