Reflection – Learning Launch

Challenge

I’m the manager of a wellbeing collective that offers several activities around sports and physical  exercise from different disciplines, at an affordable cost and in a safety way, for people of different  ages in Bogota city. The objective is to promote healthy habits and body care, the latter as one of  the fundamental pillars in human health and wellbeing. Although activities are varied (dance, yoga,  running, biking, acrobatics, aerial silks, trekking, among others) and most of them are inexpensive  or free, in the last six months the attendance of people dramatically diminished in comparison with  the first semester of the year, to the point where we had to cancel some of the scheduled activities  because no one signed up. So, the challenge is to find a strategy to maintain a high attendance of  people to the proposed activities over the next year. To achieve that, we identified two issues we  need to attend. The first one is to improve our convening power to impact new people. And the  second, to get people to stay motivated over time and constantly attend activities.

Selection

My team and I selected Learning Launch tool to address the challenge after going through a process  in which we studied the problem, interpreted the information, established the design criteria and  generated an idea. I quote Cinzia Ahmed: this tool is “a small experiment that test your new  idea in the marketplace”. As we saw in the explanations of the tool in the video conferences of the  course, we chose Learning Launch Tool because we wanted to test our idea in a real environment  or have a real experience with our users to confirm or refute a hypothesis that we built, in order to  improve and fully implement the idea in the future. Other reason was that is a fast cheap tool. We  had in mind to implement the strategy from the beginning of 2022, so we had little time and money  to test it.

Application

We decided to focus in the people that already were part of the collective as our target audience  who we wanted to keep motivated. It’s important to note that social media is our main diffusion  tool. The idea we developed -Goal(L) Together- consists in three main steps: 1) Stablishing individual  objectives that can be monitored throughout the year related with the collective’s offered activities;  2) Allowing members to lead diffusion and convening processes in social media by inviting other  people to help them to follow up their goals; 3) Sharing periodically their progress and reached goals  through short storytelling videos to motivate new people participate in the activities.

Our hypothesis was that the idea will improve both convening power part and motivation part.  Those three steps will give our members the motivation they needed to keep themselves engaged  and constantly attending to the activities by providing them a clear personal objective, a  responsibility, a follow up, and supporting feedback from the community. Not to mention the  satisfaction of being an agent of motivation for other people. In the other hand, it will help others

visualize what the collective do, with real human stories that could make people feel connected or  identified with.

So, we decided to carry out a one-week Learning Launch to invite members and new people to the  first meeting of the year: The Acroyoga Picnic. We selected 10 members to helps us with diffusion  and convening for the event and gave them access to our social media accounts. First day we had a  meeting with them in which we invited them to think about one objective they wanted to reach the  next year in the collective. They had to write it in a poster to hang in a visible place and to break the  objective down in a list of smaller achievable goals or tasks. Then, they were asked to take a little  step towards their objective each day during the rest of the week and do short videos sharing their  goals and progress in social media, and inviting people to help them keep going and to meet them  at the event. We gave them total creative freedom so they could do the videos as they wanted, but  they had to tell their own story and share at least one video per day.

To the end of the week, they told us how they felt about their progress, motivation, constancy and  discipline during the Learning Launch. We also talked about how their close ones began to be  interested and how they received support from their families and friends. Also, some people began  to ask them about the event and the collective’s activities. The feedback and interactions in social  media increased too. No doubt, a lot of funny creative inspirational material came out of this  experience. And finally, more new people than members attended the Acroyoga Picnic. Regardless,  there were a greater number of participants than at last year's event.

Insight

I think it was a really interesting exercise. We’ve never done something like that before and we  realized that these feedback that came out of the Learning Launch were very helpful to elevate de  idea quality or effectiveness and to identify problems or gaps we hadn’t seen yet. For example, after  the Learning Launch, we decided it was better that people could use also their own social media  accounts to share their stories so they could impact on those closest ones and also be able to reach  a wider and more diverse audience not limited to the collective’s followers. Another relevant aspect  that emerged was to take into account member's available time and their willingness to social media  activities. This made us see that it was a more complex challenge than we thought, and perhaps  with a better-defined scope we would have had more precise results. Overall, we learned the  importance of quick testing in the design thinking process to get better predictions and chances of  success with truly innovative ideas.

Approach

Although we could confirm our hypothesis in a short term, one of the issues we found was that the  results of the one-week Learning Launch did not give us enough information to predict the long- term people’s behavior. We think it was because our understanding of our target audience’s  unarticulated needs was very superficial, so was the solution. An alternative approach could be the  use of Ethnography tools, for instance, Personas tool and Mind Mapping tool to make sure we  deeply understand our users’ needs before we marry an idea.

