How to Craft a People-Centered Experience

Thinking About Your End-User Philosophy

Is there anything more exciting than a blank notebook? An empty canvas? A fresh, unscooped jar of peanut butter? Or, maybe for you, those visuals invoke the opposite of excitement - feelings of overwhelm or anxiety about where to begin. In this blog post, I’ll share how defining an end-user philosophy can be a great place to start when you’re trying to design a new experience or re-envision an old one.  

As part of launching The Fresh Perspective Group, we’ve been doing a lot of dreaming and careful crafting of our own. We’ve been up to the kind of work we help our clients with all the time - envisioning how we want to operate, deciding on the right tools, and implementing systems to bring our vision to life.  

The exciting challenge posed to me as the Director of Client Experience has been: “How do we take the 160+ years of experience we have among our founders and channel it into delivering the absolute best experience for our clients?” But before we could define the “how” we had to get clear on the “what” and, perhaps more importantly, the “why.” So that’s where we started: with our Client Experience Philosophy. 

Our Client Experience in a Nutshell

Clients feel valued and understood because our approach is deeply people-centered, prioritizing their unique goals, needs, and the individuals behind their work. By fostering genuine collaboration and clear communication with easy-to-use tools and streamlined processes, we create an experience where clients feel supported, empowered, and confident in our work together. 

This philosophy became the backbone that supported every decision we’ve made as we developed our business processes, services methodology, and technological tool kit. Whenever possibilities felt overwhelmingly endless or we had a tough choice to make, we were able to look at the problem through the lens of this philosophy, keeping us focused on the experience we were trying to create. 

I’m using “client experience” as a concrete example, here, but you can create a guiding philosophy for any stakeholder you may have - “program participant,” “case worker,” “donor,” “member,” or any other constituency you serve. I’ve shared concrete steps and helpful questions below to help guide you in the process if you’re ready to give it a try!  

Focus on Feelings 

Empathy is a great place to start. Imagine yourself in the shoes of your constituents and put into words how you want them to feel and what you want them to experience when engaging with you. Don’t get lost in the details - what tools you’ll use or what communications you might put in place. Take a step back further. Think about how you want your constituents to describe what it’s like to work with you. 

At TFPG, we reflected on our most successful client engagements and put into words what made them so great. Many of us got our starts as clients ourselves, so we recalled what the best parts of our past experiences felt like. We also used the opportunity to articulate the commitments we wanted to make to our clients in our new ways of working. 

From this brainstorm, clear themes emerged that became guideposts of the philosophy. Examples of those include statements like: 

• Our clients feel empowered throughout the entire experience, with tools, guidance, and support that make them more productive and confident in their decisions. 

• Clients always feel informed and confident about the process, with no room for confusion or surprises. 

These guideposts, in turn, informed the way we designed our methodology and tools. For example, to keep clients feeling informed, we created an easy-to-navigate Client Hub that centralizes the real-time data our teams need to stay up-to-date on the status of our work together. To ensure clients feel empowered to take ownership of their system, we’ve designed an intuitive system for documenting what we’ve built and why to reduce client’s dependency on our team once a change is made to their system. 

Stay True to Your Values 

Organizational values are another great resource when crafting an end-user philosophy. It’s always a good idea to think about how your overarching values infuse your everyday work. At TFPG, we have an amazing set of values, a few of which felt extra relevant as we considered the client experience: 

• People  

• Simplicity  

• Gratitude 

We spent a lot of time thinking about what a simple, people-centered, gratitude-filled client experience would feel like. To us, that means a set of tools and processes that are easy-to-use, designed to meet the real-world human needs of our clients. It also means taking time to celebrate wins and lift up the accomplishments achieved through our work together.

Don’t Be Afraid to Ask  

Putting yourself in someone else’s shoes can only get you so far. Engaging in conversation with your stakeholders is a great way to gather information. This doesn’t have to be as complicated as a large-scale survey or focus group - although we love those tools, too! It can be as simple as asking a few questions. 

• What do you like most about engaging with us? Why? 

• Where could we improve? Why? 

At TFPG, we’re actively collecting input from all our friends working at nonprofits. If you have a minute, we’d love to hear from you about your best (or not so great) experience working with technology partners. We especially want to know what about that experience made you feel the way you did. Drop us a line and let us know! 

Putting it All Together 

1. Who is my stakeholder? Describe them in as much detail as you can. 
2. What kind of interactions will they have with my organization? 
3. What feelings do we want them to feel during and after those interactions? 
4. How do we want them to describe their experience to a friend or colleague? 
5. What about that experience do we hope your stakeholder will value most? 
   

2. Identify ways that you might achieve your desired experience in practice.

Don’t focus on specific solutions, like which software you might use, but rather how the tools you choose and the way you engage with your stakeholders will invoke the experience you’re trying to achieve. 

Follow a format along these lines: <Insert experiential goal> looks like <insert real-world behavior>. 
e.g. Clear and transparent communication looks like providing real-time project status updates in an easy to access format that is available to clients any time.

3. Apply your stakeholder experience lens. Take a look at the processes, tools, and other systems you have designed (or already have in place) and ask yourself if they are achieving your desired outcome. If not, think about what would.

At The Fresh Perspective Group, we know that the best philosophies are meant to be lived, not just written. They thrive on listening, learning, and adapting to truly serve the people at the heart of your mission. 

As you put your philosophy into practice, remember: it’s not about perfection but progress. Let it guide you and stay open to revisiting and refining it. Creating meaningful experiences is an ongoing, dynamic process—one that evolves as you do.