 Do a quick test. Can you all hear me okay? Excellent. So I'm Ashley and I was invited to talk to you a little bit about design and authentic communication using kind of my journey at the White House and some of the work that we did there as case studies for it. So that's largely what I'm going to be focused on today. But I want you to know I didn't work for this White House. I worked for this White House. Just to clarify, you know, make sure you know what I'm talking about. But to give you a little bit more context, I currently work at Automatic where I head up our creative studio within our marketing division promoting all of our great products. And also the head of the inclusion part of what we call Project Muriel which is how we're making each of our products more inclusive, working on standards for practice, making sure that we're not excluding any of our customers and that we're working collaboratively with the same goals across each of our divisions. It's a little bit of what I'm doing now. One of the things that we rolled out as part of our project that's publicly available is our inclusive design starter checklist which you can access at design.blog. So please check it out. It gives you tips on things that you can do individually to kind of broaden your perspective as well as things that you can do to bring diversity of thought into your teams. And then lastly a category about just bringing that inclusion into your designs themselves. So if you're a designer or you work with designers, feel free to pass this along and we'll be updating it as we kind of grow. Here's a little bit of our team. This is a photo John took. Kind of hear more from him later. But this is us visiting small businesses. We visited Art in Motion in Detroit after setting them up with a website. So just a glimpse at the designers that we work with. Okay, so now I'm going to share a little bit about myself, some background. I'm going to go through a lot really quickly in my talk. But just to give you more context on myself and then how the job at the White House came to be because that tends to be something folks are curious about. And then lastly I'm going to fly through 15 different tips that I got on communications and design for my time working in the Obama White House. So you all ready for it? Feel free to tell me to slow down, have those notes ready, pencils ready. But I believe that the best brands are built on values. It's a belief I have that also kind of integrates with how I choose where I work. So I want to demonstrate what this means for me and it's just a personal belief. Well, first of all, I think that they're more honest and consistent right if you build your brand around what you value. They tend to attract people with shared values and so you get this much broader network of people to communicate with regularly. And then as you see, especially in the political spaces, you have much more fruitful debates when all of the brands are speaking from a place of value instead of maybe proposition or something else. And how does this apply to me personally? Well, a little story. This is my husband with me, Nathaniel. We chose to make up our last name when we got married. This is kind of a fun fact, Axios. Greek origin, but we're both designers and we're going through what most people do when they get engaged, which is thinking about how we want to build our lives together, what we want our legacy to look like, how our values tend together. And we decided to brand ourselves because designers it actually turns into a branding exercise really easily. So we came up with Axios, which is a word. It's not traditionally a name, but it means worthy or having weighted value. And it's our reminder to aspirationally live through our values, work through our values and to measure our time and what we do against what we believe and the change that we hope to make. Essence, much to my surprise. Fulpiata is one of the 29 most powerful black women in Obama administration. No big deal. I look different than I hear in different styles. But I want to back up. I'm a mixed race woman raised by a single mother with my brother who has a disability with like pretty kind of limited but typical American means. And I'm pretty young in my career and I've been very successful in a creative and a digital space. And I bring this up because I'm also an introvert and I actually don't love talking in front of people. So this is backgrounds. One of the reasons I get up and I do talks like these is because I think it's important for people to see folks with different backgrounds leading and making change and being successful in their fields. So it gets me to stand up even though it's awkward. More context. So I've worked for a little more than four years in the Office of Digital Strategy at the White House. There it didn't used to be an Office of Digital Strategy before the Obama administration but it came out of the success of the 2008 campaign where then candidate Barack Obama was able to use technology, social media, clear communications and design to connect with his constituents in really meaningful ways to show his values, to demonstrate his values, to create connection and to make change together. So naturally when he came to the White House he wanted to bring that same thing. You don't want to just go into the White House and suddenly be not only behind, you can feel like a president, behind bars with guards all around you but also be less connected to the people when you have a community organizing background. So he started the Office of Digital Strategy and brought in the first creative director who was also the only designer, creative director directing himself. We grew but the Office of Digital Strategy, ODS, is only about 20 people. Cover everything public facing for White House.gov from the websites to social media channels, online engagements with influencers, videos, a lot of stuff that you'll see eventually that's in the archives and then much of the stuff that you saw throughout the Obama administration really came from our office or at least touched our office in some way. We're really awkward as you can see in this photo. The photographers said act natural so everybody looked at their blackberries and David started laughing. Very awkward people. It's really hard to capture our whole team in one place so I'm going to show a couple of others who aren't in that photo. There's Hope Hall who is President Obama's videographer for most of the Obama administration in a bit of a role reversal. In the middle we have Duncan Wolfe who's one of our younger staffers who helped us with Snapchat. He's helping post a Snapchat post in his photo for Michelle Obama and her staffer Joanna Roscham's helping. This is in the Mac room. Here's our design team. Just three people. We grew to three from one. Yay! Doing an incredible lot of work from the social media graphics, revamping White House.gov or petitions platforms, things you'll see later. We wore many hats so you may remember Jillian from the correspondence dinner video in 2016 where she's acting. She's not an actress. She is a designer. As a creative director at the White House, here are some of the things that I did. Determined the best ways to represent the brand, which included the brand of Barack Obama, the man elected into office with Hope and Change, around his values and the brand of the White House, this historical institution, a museum, the head of the executive office and the residence for the first family. Really trying to merge those together to create the Obama White House brand, which we believe should feel different and engage authentically with the community in a way that's different than the Bush, the Clinton, previous White House experiences. I managed our design team of three, which meant like blocking things that came last minute sometimes, supporting the dose and being really hands-on, of course. Made wonky policy relatable, which included getting, you know, big stacks of paper somebody worked years on and would say, give it to the world, make everybody care about it and really helping. I'll talk more about that later, really helping make it relatable to the necessary audiences. And then doesn't usually fall in the creative director but improved the White House public-facing platforms. And the mission of the Office of Digital Strategy is connecting people with purpose or finding ways to create meaningful engagements between the public and the administration given the influence of technology on how you all get information, how you engage with one another and how you act in this age. So really trying to push government forward given technology. So in that capacity, we're all digital strategists in the Office of Digital Strategy as well. So we create those engagements, help communicate priorities via digital channels, and then increasingly hopefully you notice this as the, you know, getting into the second term and as the administration progressed, but reminding you who Barack Obama is, what he cares about, and that kind of that foundation of why he was there. We recognize that the more you see somebody behind a podium year after year, the more you kind of drone out and kind of forget that there anything about this, you know, maybe public figure kind of talking head on the TV. So I'll get into these tips soon but really quickly. I think this is important to highlight because think of some place like the White House, you think of these like hard structured systems. But in the Office of Digital Strategy, it really works like a startup in the heart of the White House. Really organically, whether you came in as an intern or you're Jason Goldman, the head of our office for the last year and a half, ideas came from anyone. We would kind of bring them in and figure out what to do with five minutes of President Obama's time to help connect him with the American people. And that was fair game and something that was really a level playing field in our office. Okay, you ready for the tips? Now still with me? Okay, narrow in on an audience. So this is a big one for us. I mentioned these folks coming to us, brilliant policy makers with 300, 600 page reports that they spend months and years on. They'd say, show this to everyone. They would say, okay, let's get specific about an audience. And they'd be like, well, like the U.S., they're like, no, like really specific about an audience that we want to reach for this policy. And they go, now that you mention it, like technically a global audience, because we really reach everyone as the White House. So we really have to pull them back to say who directly is your policy affecting? And then work with them on strategies to make sure that those folks are aware of the policy decisions or proposals sometimes that would affect their daily lives. Here's just one little example. That's a little bit more on the literal side. So one of the things we had the most information about was getting people to sign up for healthcare with open enrollment, healthcare.gov. We knew that, especially in those first couple years, we needed folks in, many of which cities had really low healthcare enrollment rates. So we had some target areas to work with, places that we could focus on a little bit more. We also knew certain types of audiences, younger millennials who are less likely to sign up for healthcare because I think we're invincible. So we had an audience there to focus on. And we dug in and came up with a few different personas that we were able to target and talk to in different ways to help make the proposal clear on why they should sign up for healthcare during the open enrollment season. In this case, we worked with an illustrator, Carolyn Bolewski, and this is just a series of social graphics that we created. It's one tiny project, but they're actually personas kind of in disguise. So we've got our athlete who is taking care of herself in so many different ways and out there, but why wouldn't you have healthcare and just making that pitch? We have our caregiver who's taking care of other people, his grandmother and mother. Why wouldn't you have healthcare for yourself? You're doing all this for somebody else. You recognize the health needs. We've got our hipster character who's eating experimental food and riding a tricycle down the middle of the street. We should probably have healthcare. So just making these things clear. And one thing that we learned is the more specific you got, the more likely as we posted this, you know, that health kind of persona on the First Lady's Instagram account, we saw people tagging their friends as it reminded them of people that they knew. So we were able to spread it much more dynamically and organically that way by relating it to individuals. All right, second tip. Set goals that stretch you. One of the things I hear a lot, and I've fallen prey to in the past, is setting up these lists of things that I want to achieve in a quarter and a year. And realizing that they're things that I can easily achieve with the time and the resources that I have available to me. That's not actually, those aren't goals. Those are tasks and you have a task list, which is also fine. But real goals that believe stretch you. They're things that you don't know that you can achieve. There's some chance that you might not be able to reach it. And so we kept this in mind in the White House to really push ourselves in our products, push ourselves in kind of setting a new standard for how government interacts. Even if it's not being followed right now, we have hope. One of the most stressful times I look at that day is the State of the Union each year. And the State of the Union has a long history, but really technology has always kind of influenced it. Originally it was something that got delivered as an update from the President. It was Constitution 2, Congress. Then it became something that got delivered and with radio, that delivery got made public. And so the audience changed from just Congress to this massive public audience. Then with television became more of an audience, an international audience, an interest. And so we felt it was our responsibility to continue that legacy and to help make the State of the Union, which had already been live-streamed during previous administrations, even more engaging, using technology to help make it more of an interaction with the public. So no pressure, right? Because President writes the speech for the speech writers in the week before. So you don't have much lead time to know what you're going to be able to achieve, what policy is going to be included. So I won't go way back, but I'll show you in 2013 one of the things we did. We had a non-responsive site, but for a few years we've been doing what we call where's my thingy? Enhanced slides, where as the speech was being written and developed, we'd follow along and realize the President only has like an hour to communicate all of this information. How can we make it more interesting for the public? How can we supplement what little he's able to say in that kind of truncated speech to help make it more clear and dynamic? And so I think in this version we had like like 200 or so slides that we, in real time, listening would interject into the live-stream to help give more substance. And so we're pulling policy, we're pulling facts and figures and information to kind of supplement. But we realize that's not enough, right? That was a big enough feat to figure out how to develop all of these in real time. The last version of the speech, usually the last edits were like right before he delivered the speech, so it's constantly changing. How do you create this kind of substance and then improve on it year to year? So we pushed ourselves. We got a little hacky. In 2014, we kind of hacked Twitter's API a little bit. We built a little tool so that some of the stuff that we're sharing on social media, at least through Twitter, would get pulled in. And so if you're watching the speech and you're really interested in a certain fact, you could reply and ask a question or you could retweet it to at least have a little bit of an engagement. And it wasn't perfect. In between it was kind of glitching and like repopulating these. It was a little weird. But we were improving on the dynamic and we were proud that we were able to push it further. So we knew that's not quite enough. We wanted to do something that wasn't limited to Twitter. How many people are on Twitter? A decent number, not everybody, right? And we wanted to make something that was much more dynamic, that didn't just bullhorn information at the public audience. So here's an example of the 2015 page which we made responsive. And we had real-time cards that were also being interjected into the page as the speech progressed. Sorry, the quality looks weird here. We included tweets but also included ways to share on Facebook through email. There were little samples of... We went to the next one. There were little samples of information. One of the things we talked about was STEM. So we gave people the ability to say if they were interested in STEM to contact another organization in a way to find out how they could sign up for development classes. Okay. So we were constantly pushing ourselves, stretching to get better and better as we went. Third tip. See failure as good data. Failures are really hard words in places like the White House. Not a word they're really comfortable with. So kind of making culture change in this space was difficult for us. But we did it by recognizing that we're going to fail and continually talking about the ways in which we turned our failures into good information so that we can kind of change the narrative in the culture a bit to respect it and to see it as a chance to learn. Here's a project I did for the Correspondence Dinner. This was a slide for a joke the president was going to say and we handed this weird piece of art and did a photo shoot with the first lady and one of the worst things that could have happened because this was around healthcare.gov's launch. We were not responsible for it. But there were technology problems obviously with healthcare.gov's launch. So around this Correspondence Dinner if you asked us the worst thing that could happen or if it was a harmful issue during the speech would be the worst thing that could happen. That's not like, we don't want any of those. We practice, we went through things thousands of times. Maybe that was actually the issue. And when this slide appeared after the president delivered or when the slide was supposed to appear when the president delivered the line it did not. It had gotten deleted from the deck. No one thought of that. It got c-span. It's being live streamed. Massive ballroom full of people. International audiences. You know what? The president ruled with it. He was graceful. He moved on to the next point and we turned it into an opportunity. The Correspondence Dinner was always about connecting the administration and the press together and so we gave the slide to press and allowed them to share it at their own role which actually extended the conversation around the Correspondence Dinner to the next day and a few days after when it probably would have died out. So we're able to see take some lessons from it and improve but also build up a culture we say this is the opportunity it presented and something that we learned that we can improve on in the future. View platforms as distinct. This is a tricky one because especially if you're a small team you don't always have the resources to have somebody who's dedicated to Instagram, somebody who's dedicated to Facebook. So how do you think about who's on what platform and how to reach those different audiences? Simply just through testing and spending time on the platforms and focusing on ones where you'll have value and just steadily moving into others. In the White House, even WhiteHouse.gov we learned how to transfer the platform and transform it into a way that was really going to serve our customer needs. Like most massive institutions the first version of it reflected our hierarchy and our internal structure. Like people had real estate of the home page. They didn't meet any of our customers' needs when they came to the home page. They were overwhelmed with information about policy that they didn't care about. We learned through some basic research that most people are looking for either the news of the day, the top thing that was happening or some kind of recent pieces of news. Just a couple or they're looking for our blog, our photos, our live streams. And so we were able to transform it to meet those needs and make it curated each day to reflect the top news and the recent news to help people with their goals. Here's the currently archived version which still kind of reflects the needs of people now. Now if you want to learn about the Obama White House you're looking for legacy information. So it's broken down into our top five legacy buckets so folks can learn more. Facebook. It started for folks in college. It's definitely not that anymore. It's a place where grandmothers teenagers and kids alike are all on it. One of the things we did with White House stock that was make sure that it had like integration that it was still the hub that people who might not be on every platform could go to to learn about the things we're doing on different platforms. But one of the things keep in mind for Facebook is that it's great for storytelling. A simple photo it feels like you shouldn't put that much content in your descriptions but it's actually a good place to tell a little story and if you want to tell a longer story direct people back to a website to learn more. It's also where people tend to represent themselves so we for the Supreme Court decision legalizing gay marriage we lit the White House up in rainbow colors. We changed our avatars across our social media presences. So it's just a virtual place to talk about your beliefs. Twitter. Animated GIFs do wonders on Twitter. We get a lot of requests for video and we find that most of the time when people are requesting videos they actually mean like simple things like animated GIFs so you can upload it natively as a video or animated GIF. In this one broke down the realization of gay marriage across the U.S. state by state to kind of show the change as a decision happened and it got like 64,000 retweets in the first couple of hours. Instagram. Obviously visual first but it has a lot in common with Facebook so it makes sense that Facebook bought it and that it's a great place for a narrative, a short narrative that can direct back to another destination for more and for activities. We would do Instagram takeovers really frequently inviting guests to come and share their own stories. This is a set that was around climate change. So instead of just talking to people about climate change we are able to kind of authentically show stories from people who are biologists and seeing change on the ground and who could talk about why it's important to protect our land and resources. Snapchat. I didn't want to touch Snapchat. It was really hard to get on Snapchat too because we were subject to the Presidential Records Act so every single thing we did is archive for the archive. So it was very hard to explain to the Chief of Staff why we needed to get on a platform where content disappeared very quickly and where they're mostly like teenagers and kids. But it's an audience for us that was how we met and could expose folks who probably have very little context or interest in like civics and public engagement and their government and how things work. And so a little vignettes, sometimes sloppy. We do a little like reveal inside the motorcade. But whose shoe is that? What are we looking at? Oh, it's Vice President Biden on his way to a thing. Just a little vignettes like that would do really great in this platform. They didn't have to be perfect because they were kind of disappear. There's a really good opportunity there. If you don't have that kind of behind-the-scenes stuff, you know, you don't need to be on Snapchat. Tip 5. Roadmap through the moments. So how many of you have planned an event before? Good number of people. You know that it's, you're like focusing all your energy on like the day itself, the event itself leading up to it. And the things that most likely fall off are the things that you plan to do, hope to do afterwards because you're kind of moving through your resources. Even in a place like the White House that would happen. So we came up with strategies and plans to, again, roadmap through the moment and to kind of offload some of that work and what was going to happen from long experience. Hard to see here. Here's a worksheet that I developed that helped remind us of our the purpose of the event, the definition of success and helped us expand like the surface area building up to the event and the plan for afterwards. And we've linked lists like influencers. They didn't have to be big. They could be internal influencers, folks who are stakeholders or held a lot of knowledge about the event or external ones who could help us, especially post event, keep the conversation going. So we use this little worksheet for the papal visit, the Pope's visit to the White House saying, okay, we're going to have, what are we going to have afterwards? We have tons of photos, video assets of the Pope with the President, with the First Lady touring around with all of the folks that came out on the National Mall. How can we lift that up afterwards and how can we rely maybe on some of our supporters or friends to help us do that so that we don't miss the opportunity to engage afterwards when we're like totally exhausted and still cleaning up. Give space for emotion. Now it is, it feels kind of funny sharing this one in the context of the White House because it feels like there's lots of emotion related to the White House and coming from the White House but we didn't really feel like we had that kind of flexibility during the Obama administration. We couldn't have the President get out there and just get furious about climate change and rant about it on Twitter or any other platform. So, but emotion is a really important part of the dynamic. I love Aristotle's tips here. Just going back to the basics. We need ethos, pathos, and logos for convincing argument or to really appeal to people on a deep level. You need the balance between them and that includes the emotional piece so the only else somebody going out to a podium and if you feel like you can't get the emotion out in those ways we'd have to kind of invent some spaces that made it a little bit more safe for somewhere as strict as the White House to get it out. Here's a correspondence skit that we did. How did we get the President to get out there and loud and show emotion? Well, we used an external vehicle. We used a Luther anger translator skit from Key and Peele and had this extra vehicle of him being the one who's yelling but he's translating for the President. So, the President's calm and collected. It's not going to upset press. Nobody's going to give him a fit about it but we get the emotion out and you get the point, right? He's upset about this but he's presidential upset. Another way that we showed we allowed space for emotion wasn't just in the President but on the public side. So you have a First Amendment right to petition the government on any issue that matters to you. Before we got into office that often meant that people were slipping paper under the White House signatures for petitions in a really physical sense. So we built a platform Republicans, Democrats, independents, Green Party anybody can get on and share their opinion what we needed to focus on and if you got 300 signatures by a certain time you got publicly visible you got enough signatures we would have a response to it and this actually affected some of our policy in a meaningful way. We didn't know that puppy mills was a really big problem in the U.S. We learned it. We were able to make change based on public input that really allowed people sometimes to just vent. And you told us that you were worried about us making a death star. Thank you for the opportunity to respond with a lot of puns. We had a lot of fun with that. Create and share the real moments. Sounds like an oxymoron because they're real moments. Do you create them? How does that work? Well, it's often necessary so don't rule this one out. The White House, the president is naturally on the White House grounds most of the time and that's actually not a real natural spot. Have them go out to talk about things like climate change, just walk out in the rose garden in his suit. It's really hard for you to understand how real it is when you're in a situation that felt like it had strict boundaries on it. So we had to go out of our way to plan things to help break that down and to make it more authentic again. Take him out of the unnatural environment of the White House and back into a more natural environment for himself. So we were lucky. We were able to plan this event. This is the first time we were president traveled just because our office was like no, it needs to happen. We sent President Obama to Alaska, to the glaciers directly to talk about climate change. So you could see the glaciers in the background when he was talking about it. You could see the effects. You could talk with scientists but in the natural environment instead of the really clinical environment that kind of get forced into sometimes. So keep those sorts of things in mind that you can kind of push the boundaries and invent these faces. And it is more authentic. Have a sense of humor. I already kind of hinted at this one. But it's so much easier to talk about serious things if you get folks to laugh a bit too. So need a direct traffic to healthcare.gov for open enrollment series. Let's have the president go on between two ferns. Let's partner with Fannie or Die. Let's let him make fun of himself. Let's let Zach Gallifnack make fun of the president. This video went viral. It didn't go viral because he's talking about healthcare.gov but it still got more people to get healthcare as a result of it. And so we're proud of that achievement. Even people make fun of us and the weird things we made the president do. He's very into it so it's fine. Make it a dialogue. This relates to what I was talking about with the State of the Union as well. But it's tempting as any brand with your small business or really big institutional organization company to just talk at people, to just tell them, tell them, tell them what you want them to know. Even the smallest bit of dialogue can really change the dynamic was times where we had the president reply to a tweet from somebody else. Who thought it would leave me at that person's day that the president would reply response that there would be a two-way dialogue so look for those opportunities. Sometimes they're really big ones like this but most of the meaningful ones are actually pretty, you know, pretty small ones that might feel insignificant to you but make a difference in folks lives. Try to partner. There are almost so many things that we could do on our own or dream up of an office with 20 people so we would partner. Here we brought in StoryCorps and we're like what would you do if we gave you this set amount of time with the president? Who would you have him talk to? And they brought in this brilliant young man and they had this great conversation nobody told them what to say. We are very hands off we just helped the opportunity happen so remember to give away a little bit of your control sometimes and you'll get unexpected and really cool results. Test your assumptions. We heard a little bit about this fear in this room earlier from Chris we didn't have the opportunity to do a whole lot of user research it's generally found upon for the government to knock on doors and ask questions about what people like to do but we do AB tests here are just some four emails leading up to the state of the union so we could learn like what were ways that we could get people a little bit more engaged so we could use the right language when we had the most traffic later. Which work best? It was different for different buttons so sign up worked really well as a way to get people to register and get a reminder to watch later so making it like an event in a more official way as if they were registering and they'd actually follow up if they felt like they had signed up for it. Which is a nice little trick because it's not like we were charging people to watch the state of the union or anything like that. This is a hard one to learn but sometimes it makes the most sense to tone down the brand unless you're just trying to build up brand awareness. Here's a social graphic we did in 2012 we've got the seal twice we've got the president and the vice president and it's like WhiteHouse.gov and a quote it's like overkill on branding like we know where this is coming from it's a little bit much and we found that it was decreasing engagement because maybe they agreed with the thing the president was saying but they didn't want to be associated directly with President Obama or they were nervous about sharing something that felt very White Housey. So when we're trying to get people to communicate these big issues we just share the points themselves and tone down the brand and it would increase the amount of engagement that we got. We still had design standards besides they're all kind of hard to see but we had standards that matched different areas of focus for our office like so ACA health care related stuff tended to be yellow use certain type so that we'd have consistency across our platforms but it was like the subtle brand things quality not the hard brand stuff logos everywhere. Capitalized on engagement Chris also spoke to this earlier so I'll fly right through it but once you get somebody to engage once statistically they're much much more likely to engage again so use that as a chance to continue the engagement. Maybe we sometimes have like five ass in a row it's like let's just see how many things you'll do you signed up for an email list thank you follow us on Twitter thank you just keep it going because folks will go along and then you've got more ways to communicate and dialogue with them in the future make the points the frame feel they're just simple ones to take the cognitive load off of your end customers your folks you're communicating with we get hard data like this and sort through it try to figure out what it means make the first version of the chart so people ages 25 to 34 college degrees what are you trying to say in this chart right like you really have to sit on it for a bit to get it so we make the title the point that we're trying to make and then use all of the other visuals and stuff to support that to really take the work out of it knowing that people are busy so the point is women now make up the majority of college and graduate students and then you see how the graph supports that and you can see the source for the data and dig in more if you wanted to and so we did this really really frequently just made it easier for folks to kind of get the real facts well facts but get the real facts in like simple ways and be able to then kind of dig in and see where the information came from and validated validation okay last one take no shame in matching on this is like partnering up there's so much that you could do on your own and you're tempted to I'm sure to do much of your daily work sometimes it's best to just roll it into work that is happening other places so if there's a hashtag that's already trending that people are using use that for your campaign if there are events that are already happening don't always have to create your own sometimes you can integrate and engage with where people are doing their results so I've seen through a lot I have a Q&A later so with that I will just say thanks for watching alright thank you Ashley