TWS is a community organization that’s all about making our cities feel more like neighborhoods by breaking the barriers between strangers. It starts with a conversation – five strangers, two hours. There are two primary users in TWS – attendees and hosts. I am responsible for making the hosting experience as friction-less and rich as possible, which then trickles down to better attendee experiences as well.
Here’s what I’m doing for them:
- working with hosts in our narrowed list of six active cities to increase number of tea times, attendance rates and community bonding activities
- creating service design blueprints to outline and communicate hosting + new host onboarding processes
- leading various teams of hosts to conduct research into host user experience and create new educational resources for new hosts
- creating new dashboards to better utilize data about tea times and attendee and host activity to make better strategic and tactical decisions
Here's a sneak peak of the types of service blueprints I created:
Here's what the founder has had to say about the impact of my work for Tea with Strangers:
In my time working with Elisabeth, she has been a linchpin in every aspect of the work we have done at Tea With Strangers to redevelop our organization from the ground up. By this point, I couldn’t imagine our organization without her.
A short story from our first day working together that may shed some light on this —
The first day we met to talk about “Tea With Strangers 2.0,” she came to our meeting with a stack of process maps — each one painted a picture of how we carried out some operation in the organization. How we onboard a new host, how we convert an attendee to a host, how we support a host in their first tea time, etc.. Being new to the inner workings of the organization, there were gaps in each of these processes that weren’t clear off the bat, so with each of these process maps, she brought a list of questions to fill the gaps. These were good questions, and they were all questions that I would either have glanced over working on my own or ignored entirely because sometimes it’s just easier to kick the can down the road.
Elisabeth knew better, and she made sure we had articulated answers to every question about how and why we did what we did.
It didn’t take long before Elisabeth made those process maps entirely comprehensive. In so doing, she revealed areas for improvement in our operation that were staring at me in the face for ages. This is something I learned would be a frequent occurrence in working with her.
From there, it didn’t take long for Elisabeth to go through each of our processes, one by one, to identify huge opportunities for us to learn more about our different community members (hosts and attendees), streamline processes that were bottlenecking the organization’s goals, and, all-in-all, make the experience of Tea With Strangers — on the user-facing front end and the operations-focused back end — far more effective.
This was day 1 of Elisabeth working with TWS. She was well-researched. She had excellent questions. She took time to listen and understand before offering ideas.
Each day after has been a story of the same. Elisabeth has consistently demonstrated a rare level of thoughtfulness in how she tackles problems that has made working with her a constant joy. I never leave a conversation with her without feeling like I learned something new, and I couldn’t imagine TWS without her.