Overview
Mothers’ Milk Bank of Austin is the world’s largest non-profit milk bank, with a mission to save babies’ lives by providing prescribed, pasteurized donor human milk. They wanted to increase brand awareness in the Austin area and bring in more milk donors, but they weren’t sure how. We ran a one-week design sprint with several members of our team and 4 key stakeholders from MMBA in order to brainstorm and validate an idea for engaging more people in the community with their mission.
Brainstorming Workshops
During the first two days of the design sprint, we ran a number of workshop activities in order to gain alignment on long and short term goals, as ideas for how we could reach those goals. Through activities like “How Might We” and journey mapping, we were able to hone in on what we wanted our focus to be. Every member of the team then did several ideation and sketching sessions, after which we discussed and voted on the ideas.
One of our primary Sprint Questions ended up being “Can we educate new parents so early about donating that it becomes a natural reality if able?” so we decided to focus early in the journey on engaging mothers and partners with MMBA, as well as educating them on the benefits of donating. In pursuit of this goal, we honed in the idea of a marketing campaign that would lead to a quick and fun quiz that served the dual purpose of educating the public about their mission, as well as screening whether a mother was eligible to donate milk. By the end of the second day, we had collaboratively sketched out a flow for this idea.
Prototyping & User Testing
We then created a high-fidelity prototype of the flow that we had sketched together and used this to test the concept with five mothers in the community. We took note of the positive and negative feedback during testing, and then synthesized those findings and reported back to the stakeholders at MMBA. Based on the feedback from testing, we also provided recommendations for improvements that could be made to the flow.
Outcome
Overall, the mothers reacted very positively to the prototype – they appreciated the easy way to get screened for donation and by the end understood how they would be able to help MMBA with their mission. They also enjoyed the education we had sprinkled throughout the quiz and the personal stories of milk recipients at the end created a deep sense of empathy.
MMBA worked with another agency in order to implement the quiz. It was able to engage and educate many mothers, partners, and other members of the community, as well as provide an easy way for mothers to get screened for milk donation.