The Situation

A leadership advisory group at a multi-office professional services firm wanted to better understand growing concerns around remote work and office attendance.

The Approach

Through discovery conversations, we reframed the project from a narrow “work from home” conversation into a broader exploration of how blended work environments were impacting mentorship, collaboration, and perceptions of work quality across teams and offices.

A customized survey process helped leadership gather more meaningful insight into employee experiences, communication patterns, and organizational concerns.

What Emerged

While most employees were satisfied with existing flexibility policies, the findings revealed deeper concerns around mentorship, talent development, and perceived quality of work.

The process also helped leadership identify important distinctions between operational challenges, communication dynamics, and broader cultural concerns that were previously being grouped together.

Outcomes & Next Steps

The organization used the findings to guide future focus groups, explore mentorship strategies, and begin conversations around succession planning and talent development within a blended work environment.

The Situation

A small business owner preparing to launch a subscription-based product wanted to gather meaningful customer feedback during an in-person promotional event while also creating an experience that felt interactive, welcoming, and useful for participants.

The Approach

Together, we designed a feedback process that combined facilitated table conversations, structured prompts, and interactive participation activities to encourage honest and actionable input. The process focused on helping attendees respond to specific aspects of the product experience while also surfacing broader themes around marketing, participation, and customer preferences.

What Emerged

The feedback helped identify which elements of the product experience generated the strongest enthusiasm, which components were less meaningful to participants, and how the business could better position the offering for people who wanted community and participation without pressure or rigid expectations.

Outcomes & Next Steps

The business owner used the findings to refine product offerings, simplify certain elements of the customer experience, and strengthen marketing language around accessibility, participation, and community-building

The Situation

An independent writer with a large subscriber audience knew audience feedback would likely be helpful for future planning and growth, but felt hesitant about launching a survey out of concern that it could become emotionally overwhelming or open the door to feedback that felt difficult to manage productively.

The Approach

We worked together to reframe the feedback process as an intentional tool for community engagement and strategic decision-making rather than an open-ended invitation for criticism. I provided consultation on question framing, survey structure, participation tone, and ways to create useful boundaries around the types of feedback being collected.

The final survey balanced strategic questions with more personality-driven prompts that reflected the tone and identity of the writer’s existing community.

What Emerged

The survey became not only a source of useful audience insight, but also an additional point of connection between the writer and subscribers. The process surfaced valuable feedback around future platform decisions, content interests, and community preferences while reinforcing the writer’s confidence in approaching audience feedback more intentionally.

Outcomes & Next Steps

The findings informed future strategic decisions, generated new content ideas, and helped establish feedback collection as a more sustainable and approachable part of the writer’s ongoing audience engagement process.

The Situation

A community-based social services organization wanted to better understand the experiences of both program participants and partner organizations in order to strengthen future planning, improve funding communication, and better capture the impact of its work.

The Approach

I developed a mixed-methods feedback process that included surveys and focus groups for both service recipients and community partners. Because many participants faced barriers related to technology access, transportation, scheduling, and caregiving responsibilities, the process was intentionally designed to reduce participation obstacles and support more meaningful engagement.

We also worked to identify participant compensation approaches that felt appropriate and genuinely useful for each audience involved. Throughout the process, I aligned feedback questions and analysis directly with the organization’s broader strategic planning goals so the findings could support both program insight and long-term organizational planning efforts.

What Emerged

The process generated both quantitative feedback and personal stories that helped the organization better understand participant experiences, partner relationships, and the broader impact of the services being provided.

The findings also highlighted opportunities to strengthen communication, partnership development, and future program planning efforts while also helping the organization better assess progress toward strategic priorities.

Outcomes & Next Steps

The organization used the findings to strengthen future funding requests, communicate impact more effectively, and support ongoing strategic and programmatic planning.

The Situation

A public institution facing student retention challenges initially sought to better understand why students were leaving by reviewing existing exit survey data and refining categories related to student departure.

The Approach

During the project, it became clear that collecting feedback only after students had already decided to leave limited the institution’s ability to respond proactively. I helped shift the focus toward understanding the experiences of current students while they were still actively engaged.

The project included research into factors connected to student retention, development of a campus-wide survey informed by existing literature, and creation of a cross-functional steering committee representing key student-facing departments. Throughout the process, stakeholders were actively involved in reviewing survey development, refining questions, and building organizational buy-in around the initiative.

Following survey administration, I facilitated collaborative conversations with advising teams, faculty, student support staff, and other stakeholders to help identify actionable opportunities for improvement.

What Emerged

The process surfaced important patterns related to student connection, support systems, campus experience, and barriers impacting retention. It also created opportunities for departments to move beyond siloed perspectives and engage in more collaborative problem-solving around student experience.

Outcomes & Next Steps

The findings informed ongoing student success and retention efforts across multiple departments and helped support broader institutional conversations around student engagement, support, and persistence.