CENTER FOR YOUTH
MINISTRY TRAINING
< Back to Work
Strategy & Development
2023
FROM PROBLEM
TO DESIGN
Our Process
Over the years Marion Design Co has sought out and participated in innovative thinking to help churches succeed, grow and meet new challenges. One of these partnerships led to working with the Center for Youth Ministry Training on redesigning their Innovation Culture Index Survey that helps churches assess the way innovation is handled and cultivated in their church.
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Although CYMT has been running the Innovation Culture Index for several years, their expanding vision and innovative culture demanded a more user friendly and engaging survey experience. In addition they wanted to offer a better discussion guide for individual churches to debrief following the survey.
The survey is designed for 10% of a church congregation to take and needed to accommodate smaller churches as well as large churches. The Innovation Culture Index assesses through a series of 45 questions a faith community's attitudes and innovative potential by examining a set of nine distinct indicators: risk response, input, existential vision, environment, composition, connectivity, binds, implementation & experimentation.
Issues CYMT had been running into were two-fold. First, all collection and group scoring had to be done manually, slowing down the process and costing CYMT more money. Second, while creating something visually interesting was key for enhancing the user experience - the analytics and backend of the survey also needed to be improved to streamline the workflow.
accessibilityThe end result should take into account the way users may take the survey and in particular, be sensitive to color blindness as color is incorporated into the design.
engagement
Because of the survey's length it is key that there is a component of visual interest throughout the experience of taking the survey. The goal was to spark curiosity for the participant since it is measuring innovation.
ease of use
A lot of time was spent by individual churches, crunching numbers off of their congregational participants averages of the data collected. Therefore, our goal was to implement automatic calculations to reduce the extra work.
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Our team began by having a conversation with the CYMT’s Innovation Lab team in order to understand needs and to address existing shortfalls in the survey platform. Before we could dive into the story we wanted to tell through the survey process, we had to research survey platforms to find one that would allow for each of the project objectives. By researching, testing, and analyzing a list of survey platforms it was decided Typeform would be the best solution with an added build-on using a Google Sheets integration for calculating end scores.
From there we used language of soil we had gathered from the ICI team. Building upon the parable of the sower (Matthew 13) we mindmapped and thought about the condition of the soil and created a visual landscape that would shift throughout the survey to tell the story of cultivation, planting, taking root, and flourishing. To account for churches from rural, city, or other communities and landscapes we reframed agricultural references and went with border soil and garden based imagery.
From there, we developed a series of color palettes to consider, and landed on a set of lively colors that paired with the Innovation Lab’s brand, was engaging, and took into account color blindness and contrast.
Each of the nine indicators that are central to the survey was considered with care as we dove into visual metaphors that pertained to growth, gardening, and soil. The end result would show an illustration on each end of the scale to reinforce and easily communicate the level of innovative health of the organization.
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The final survey became as much a clear and helpful tool as it did a storytelling piece and work of art. The end result is incredibly visually engaging as the user watches as the soil is cultivated, roots grow, plants blossom, and the health of the soil is maintained by the animals within its’ environment as they crawl and root around. This not only helps people to see their progress as the snail makes his way through the survey but also begins giving them metaphors to think about the health and innovativeness within their church community.
Alongside the survey we designed a discussion toolkit in partnership with Discipleship by Design which allows the churches to meet in person and have conversations that help them to understand the perception of innovation within their church and move forward with more knowledge from a place of group understanding.
This project is a great example of the care with which we seek to approach each of our projects and showcases our design, illustrations and design thinking skills as well as all the backend research, math, and calculations that will allow CYMT and their partner churches to grow, discuss, and innovate with ease.
