Mar
—
May 2026
Making Impact Visible Through Data
Role
Service Designer
Co-Design Facilitator
Tools
Figma
Miro
Skills
Service blueprinting
Ecosystem mapping
Persona creation
Grace Ho
Sara Her
May Kim
Mars Nevada
Shreesa Shrestha
Team
Context
A cultural center at a pivotal moment
DiasporaDNA is a Philadelphia-based non-profit dedicated to celebrating artists across multiple diasporas through art, archives, ancestry workshops, and city-wide festival programming. In April 2026, they transitioned from a "pop-up" model to a permanent space near Penn's Landing — a moment of organizational growth that exposed structural gaps in how data was collected, managed, and used.
Our team focused primarily on DiasporaDNA's Save Philly Festivals initiative, which aims to empower festival producers with resource toolkits and workshops to help them celebrate their cultures and communities.
Project Brief
How can we better understand the impact of the DiasporaDNA programs? We have surveys we send out to assess sentiment, but how can we make the most out of this information, or get a more comprehensive view of our impact as an organization? This is important for us to secure future grant funding.
Problem
Data was being collected.
It just wasn't doing anything.
Currently, DiasporaDNA hands out surveys and collects feedback at the end of workshop sessions, but the data collection was inconsistent and challenging as staff didn't want to interject during times of networking and connecting. As a result, grant writers struggled to demonstrate a strong enough impact to earn the confidence of funders. To understand how we could demonstrate a stronger impact, we needed to analyze the system and identify the gaps and opportunities.
Research
From blueprint to co-design to intervention.
We met with DiasporaDNA's impact director to map out the full 8-phase lifecycle — Promotion through Follow-up — across four swim lanes: participant journey, front-of-stage staff, backstage operations, and support systems.
Three Personas, one broken system.
We built three archetypes — Staffer/Volunteer, New Festival Producer, Returning Festival Producer — each mapped across current behavior, enablers and blockers, proposed interventions, and a desired future state. Together, they showed that the organization's challenges weren't about any one person failing, but rather a system that could be improved.
DiasporaDNA Staff
New Festival Producer
Returning Festival Persona
Everything depends on data.
DiasporaDNA's key relationships are deeply interdependent. Participants generate impact stories, which strengthen grants, which fund programming, which attracts more participants. This ecosystem loop highlights opportunities to close gaps through better data management, which would both improve programming for regular participants and build more credible impact evidence for grant writers.
Interventions
Every solution had to work within the team's capacity.
Every intervention was designed around a single constraint: it had to work with DiasporaDNA's actual capacity, which is a team made up of several volunteers who may not have experience with managing data. Anything requiring significant new skills or major costs wouldn't serve the team well.
Collaborative Evaluation Planning Exercise
A three-activity workshop framework mirrors the structure of a grant application: community needs research, outcome brainstorming, and outcome-aligned survey writing. Designed to be facilitated by interns and volunteers, each activity builds on the last and accumulates into a reusable knowledge base.
Interactive Data Art
A field guide with 7 low-cost activity formats — dot voting walls, community origin maps, ribbon installations, button badges — that embed data collection into the event experience itself. Every format is mapped to specific grant-ready data outputs: vote counts, demographic spread, sentiment shift, quote collection. Includes consent language in three versions, a materials list, and a data capture guide for post-event archiving.
Dot voting wall
Story Ribbon Installation
Word / Phase Wall
Data Management System
We recommended Airtable and Google Data Studio as two implementation paths — Airtable for teams comfortable with databases, Google for those already in the Drive ecosystem. Included a starter Airtable template pre-structured around the grant metrics defined in the planning exercise, so the connection between data collection and grant reporting was built in from day one.
Impact
What changes when the data flows
We mapped not just the intended outcomes of each intervention, but the ripple effects across the broader ecosystem. This meant anticipating where success could create new problems, and designing mitigations in advance.
Positive Impacts
Event responses accumulate into a living archive of Philadelphia's diaspora communities
Cohort data maps where emerging producers live, useful for city partnerships and press
Producers with shared interests begin organizing independently, extending DiasporaDNA's reach
Fellowship word-of-mouth builds a peer cohort, not just an organizational pipeline
Risks we designed for
RISK: Digital-only registration excludes lower digital-literacy neighborhoods
MITIGATION: In-person sign-up at partner locations
RISK: Data art stories shared without consent
MITIGATION: addressed with check-in norms and a survey opt-in
RISK: Unpaid fellowship reproduces class barriers
MITIGATION: Stipend details should accompany every mention
RISK: Producers self-organize and disengage
MITIGATION: Sustaining unique value through programming and connections
Next Steps
Looking forward to the future
In the future to address the future of DiasporaDNA and festival culture, we have carefully considered how to reach out to new potential festival producers in both in-person and digital channels.
If given more time, I'd have wanted to test the Data Art Toolkit in a live event setting before delivery, and to co-design the Airtable schema directly with the grant writer rather than handing off a starter template. I'd also want to revisit the ripple effect mapping with DiasporaDNA leadership. The negative impacts we identified, including consent gaps, class barriers in fellowship access, and risks of overcapacity, deserve dedicated design work, not just footnotes.