About
InStride drives meaningful social and business outcomes by unlocking access to life-changing education. In collaboration with quality academic institutions, they enable employers to provide career-aligned, debt-free education to their workforces.
InStride partnered with us in three different capacities: customer research, brand strategy, and product design.
Working on these different pillars in tandem gave us the advantage of a holistic understanding of the organization and stimulated stakeholder engagement which led to a unified implementation strategy.
Challenge
Establish strong brand recognition seamlessly across diverse digital touch-points, ensuring cohesive and compelling messaging that resonates effectively with a wide array of target audiences—enhancing brand visibility, credibility, and engagement across all digital platforms.
Business Value
Enhanced usability resulted in a more intuitive and user-friendly experience, ultimately driving higher user engagement and improved conversion rates.
User Value
A unified brand journey ensured that each type of customer, across their respective experience domains, encountered consistent messaging, seamless interactions, and tailored experiences that resonate with their needs and expectations.
If someone knows how to learn, they know how to survive and thrive."
Head of Accessibility Programs and Disability Inclusion
We conducted three comprehensive research efforts to uncover the needs of InStride’s diverse target audience groups.
Buyer Research
InStride had three goals they wanted this research to accomplish:
Help sales and marketing teams better understand buyers’ needs to facilitate meaningful conversations at any sales funnel stage.
Empower HR admins and education program owners with improved reporting on their programs’ success.
Create tangible artifacts that help InStride team members—across product strategy, design, marketing, and beyond—to empathize with and effectively serve corporate customers and decision-makers.
Learner Research
InStride sought a deeper understanding of its key learner groups—frontline workers, knowledge workers, and aspiring managers/leaders.
By examining how their wants, needs, and desires shape their approach to education and careers, InStride gained valuable insights to enhance its service and communication with learners today while also informing its long-term platform strategy.
Manager Research
We conducted individual and paired interviews with managers and employees in the context of their daily jobs and homes.
These interviews explored how InStride could help organizations strengthen manager/employee relationships and drive career and business growth through strategic enterprise education.
Connecting the dots between marketing and product.
We worked in lock-step with InStride’s teams and encouraged participation through facilitated brainstorm sessions, critiques, and workshops. These activities played a key role in producing outcomes that the team embraced because they played a critical role in crafting them.
Virtual workshops
We conducted meetings and workshops virtually as the program took place during the height of the pandemic. We used interactive tools and built in low-tech participation options to stimulate engagement.
Stakeholder interviews
We aligned with stakeholders from the start to build leadership-backed solutions.
Redesigning InStride's website to drive consistency and uniformity
After learning how key stakeholders at InStride wish to portray the company’s value publicly we aimed to revamp the core pages of InStride.com to effectively communicate the company’s value proposition.
Extending the new brand strategy to social channels
We audited InStride’s visual campaign approach to their social platforms and identified inconsistencies and areas of opportunity to improve their content, especially in the context of platform intent. We then created a visual style guide to streamline the creation and cohesion of future campaign visuals.
Redesigning InStride's website to drive consistency and uniformity
After learning how key stakeholders at InStride wish to portray the company’s value publicly we aimed to revamp the core pages of InStride.com to effectively communicate the company’s value proposition.
Extending the new brand strategy to social channels
We audited InStride’s visual campaign approach to their social platforms and identified inconsistencies and areas of opportunity to improve their content, especially in the context of platform intent. We then created a visual style guide to streamline the creation and cohesion of future campaign visuals.
