Cultivating Collaboration at the Water Cooler

Clients: Lyda Hill Philanthropies & The Dallas Foundation

Human-Centered Design | Qualitative Research | Prototyping | Storytelling | Client Management

Design Challenge: How might we establish an environment of collaboration for Water Cooler tenants at Pegasus Park?

The Scenario

The Water Cooler is a community of nonprofit tenants who office at Pegasus Park, an innovation park near Downtown Dallas. Established in 2020, the Water Cooler aims to bring together nonprofits in a world-class work environment to improve productivity, foster community, and drive collaboration to build a more impactful Dallas social sector.

Already, the Water Cooler at Pegasus Park is one of the largest social sector real estate centers in the country with more than 30 tenant organizations working across various cause areas. Members receive subsidized rent offering(s), access to philanthropic funds for furniture and infrastructure, and free or low-cost amenities and services designed to accelerate their respective missions.

Our design team partnered with Lyda Hill Philanthropies and The Dallas Foundation to explore how we might establish an environment of collaboration at the Water Cooler.

The Solution

Informed by our design research efforts, our design team prototyped a new digital communications platform to connect community members, the Water Cooler Community LinkedIn page.

My Role

  • Lead: I led a team of four multi-disciplinary designers through all phases of our human-centered design project including secondary and primary research, ideation, prototype design, and implementation.

  • Connect: I leveraged existing relationships in the non-profit community to connect with Water Cooler leaders and quickly build trustworthy relationships with our client and key stakeholders.

  • Research: I helped execute all phases of our design research methods including coordination, planning, design, deployment, and synthesis of key learnings and insights.

  • Amplify: I amplified the work of our design team by continuing to check in with the client and Water Cooler community regularly and sharing the project case study at professional conferences.

The Design Process

Our team leveraged a human-centered design process to support our client, the Water Cooler. Our iterative process is illustrated below.

Context & Understanding

Our team set out to answer four guiding questions:

  • How are tenants and staff accessing and utilizing existing services?

  • How are tenants and staff using current services to collaborate?

  • What shared services might interest tenants and staff?

  • What is Water Cooler management’s role in delivering services?

We engaged the Water Cooler community and content experts through a comprehensive design research effort that included observation, in-depth interviews, and community surveys to understand the current state of the Water Cooler, what services would improve the community member experience, and how organizations might collaborate together.

01 Design Research

  • The Water Cooler is a newly developed work environment. Through observation, our design team aimed to understand the office design, space use, and the overall experience for Water Cooler community members.

    We spent more than 10 hours touring individual offices of United to Learn, The Dallas Foundation, Uplift Education, and Social Venture Partners, and working from the space. We learned that within the five floors of the Water Cooler, there are three types of office styles for tenants: open co-working space, private office suites, and entire floor offices. We also learned that each organization is managing the hybrid work environment independently.

    We understood that whatever we designed would need to support various organizations and their work styles.

  • As we built context around this context, our team focused on two types of experts: social sector real estate projects in other markets and existing Water Cooler partners who were already providing specific services to tenant organizations.

    Specifically, we interviewed the Nonprofit Centers Network, a membership-based association of nonprofit centers around the United States, and Second Day, a non-profit who specializes in recruiting interns to the social sector and has an existing partnership with the Water Cooler.

    Through these interviews, we worked to understand 1) best practices around establishing connections and fostering collaboration within nonprofit centers and 2) how talent development and human capital play a key role in building trust and collaboration.

  • The Water Cooler houses more than 25 different nonprofit organizations that operate at various scales and each have a different definition of collaboration. We wanted to understand how Executive Directors and leaders within these organizations intentionally invested organizational resources (time, people, funding) in collaborative work.

  • Our design team also wanted to understand a broad range of current experiences and future desires for Water Cooler community members outside of organizational leadership. To do this, we sent a community survey that asked questions related to 1) the current experience accessing amenities and services, 2) what prevents people from collaborating across organizations, and 3) what services or tools would help you collaborate in the future?

    Overall, we had 41 individual responses representing 15 different organizations. 51% or participants said they currently collaborate in some capacity in their role. Generally, staff said they found it difficult to connect with other Water Cooler community members and lacked an understanding of the mission of peer organizations. Also, there was an overwhelming response that a digital community would help them connect with others.

Research revealed that while Water Cooler community members expressed interest in collaboration, they lacked awareness of who their peers were and what they did. There was a desire for clear structures and tools to facilitate connections and participation. Many expressed difficulty in connecting with others and saw the potential for technology to bridge this gap.

02 Research Insights

I'm not sure who to contact, what their roles are, what their work entails to identify opportunities to collaborate.

- Community Survey Response

I think it will be important to consider implementing things that will make it easy for us to communicate and see potential for collaboration.

- Community Survey Response

40% of survey respondents disagreed or strongly disagreed with this statement:

I am able to easily build relationships with other Water Cooler employees.

Across all research efforts, Water Cooler community members continually expressed interest in the following digital communications services to help facilitate relationship building and collaboration:

  • Bulletin Board

  • Shared Calendar

  • Employee Profiles

  • Content Sharing

The Prototype: Water Cooler Community LinkedIn Group

A digital community platform emerged as a promising solution that management could provide its tenants. We sought existing platforms that could seamlessly integrate into community members’ professional experience. We also were working with time and budgetary constraints from our client.

Ultimately, we utilized LinkedIn as our platform because our audience was professional facing and it was highly probably that most organizations and community members already had profiles, eliminating a key hurdle of account creation.

Our prototype consisted of two phases: digital and in-person. Our prototype focused on answering three primary questions:

  • Will people join?

  • Will it serve a baseline need to share information?

  • Will people use it to create new connections in person without nudges or facilitation?

We launched the LinkedIn group by promoting it across multiple communication channels throughout the Water Cooler.

We designed and tested content that aligned with what we heard in our initial community survey. Eventually, community members even posted their own organic content about upcoming organizational events.

01 Digital Prototype

After we launched the digital phase and started to see participation, we were curious whether this new digital experience could be leveraged to inspire in-person connections and relationship building. So, we added to our prototype by hosting an in-person Water Cooler Community Meet Up.

We promoted the Water Cooler Community Meet Up exclusively through the LinkedIn Group and hosted it on campus on a Tuesday morning.

While we had no attendees, we realized there were still learnings to carry forward:

  • Day of week and time of day are critical to driving high attendance

  • The Water Cooler needs to establish norms around programming expectations to increase participation over time

02 In-Person Prototype

The Results

Over the course of four weeks, we continued to monitor the Water Cooler LinkedIn Group. Additionally, we distributed a post-prototype survey to capture more data about the holistic participant experience, including specific actions we could not directly gather from the public LinkedIn group.

We also learned the majority of community members who joined the LinkedIn group were senior leadership at their respective organizations: Managers, Directors, Senior Directors, and CEO/Executive Directors.

61

signups within 24 hours

Water Cooler community members

115+

25%

community member participation

organizations represented

28

of survey respondents added new LinkedIn connections

30%

The Impact

The Water Cooler Community LinkedIn Group highlighted a path forward around embracing a digital experience to share content, collaborate, and connect for both management and tenants.

Our design team laid out specific design principles and actionable design recommendations for our client to consider and implement moving forward.

  • Invest in a Digital Community: Investing in a digital community would provide Water Cooler organizations and community members with increased access to needed information to build new relationships together.

  • Leverage Digital to Complement In-Person: Leveraging digital to complement in-person programs and spaces would add to a holistic experience and set clear structures for community participation.

  • Provide a Consistency of Hospitality: Providing a consistency of hospitality over time will deepen trust between mamangement and community members and increase adoption of services.