Communicating Complexity

A case study in cross-team collaboration and communication of niche knowledge

Background

Northwestern University's development department is responsible for growing the university endowment. Within the development department, niche skilled roles such as gift officers and prospect researchers. Although they have a shared fundraising goal, communication becomes difficult between the two highly-specialized roles.

Shared goals such as identifying and reaching out to prospect leads become a difficult task, with the two roles disagreeing on the definition of a highly-rated prospect.

Interdisciplinary Problem Framing

Knowing that the issue is merely a symptom of current processes, I used an interdisciplinary apporach to understand and address the issue:

  • Exploratory Data Analysis to uncover patterns and tells
  • Double Diamond Design Model to discover and define the problem
  • Using the Knowledge Era as a conceptual base
Presentation