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Beyond Good Intentions: Transforming Service Design for NGOs

Enterprise UX

Designing experiences for people at work

February 17, 2025

When thinking about service design, we might envision seamless customer experiences, digital products for consumers, or frictionless interactions. But what if the customer isn’t a consumer but a refugee seeking asylum, a scientist trying to communicate his research, or a volunteer struggling to find a meaningful role within a nonprofit. In the corporate world, service design can be a huge competitive advantage. In the nonprofit world, service design can be a force multiplier—yet organizations often overlook its value.

Magda Jagielska, a Customer Experience System Manager at Rockwell Automation, joins me for this column. We’ll take a rare detour outside the large, for-profit, enterprise environments that my columns typically cover. I believe that Magda’s insights can benefit any UX design professional, working within any context. Magda will describe her experiences applying service design within two nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) focusing on science communications. Her goals were to enhance customer engagement, reduce inefficiencies, and create lasting impact. Magda will take it from here. The rest of this column is in her words.

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The Volunteer Experience No One Designed

Most NGOs operate under constant pressure as they navigate grant cycles, bureaucratic hurdles, and volunteer turnover. They rarely have the resources, time, or space to design systems that work smoothly and sustainably. Instead, they find themselves working in reactive mode, firefighting issues rather than developing long-term solutions.

But what if funding and policy weren’t the only factors determining whether an NGO survives or thrives? What if the way NGOs design their services and internal structures had equally significant impacts?

When I worked for one of the Polish Science Communication NGOs, we had an ambitious mission: to share science, teach critical thinking, and equip scientists with skills to engage with the public. We were successful in many ways: we built a strong presence, had a successful public-speaking training program, and a growing budget. We expanded our network significantly and increased engagement with media outlets. However, beneath this glossy surface, we were experiencing the following problems:

  • A small, overburdened core of volunteers carried out most of the work.
  • A large number of recruits slowly disengaged because they didn’t know where or how to contribute.

We had assumed that passionate people would find their own way and that, if we recruited the right people, they would figure out how to integrate into our workforce, but they didn’t. This wasn’t a recruitment problem, it was a design problem.

Mapping the Volunteer Journey: Where We Were Losing People

We needed to understand our organization better before we could fix it. So we did what any service designer would do for an external audience of users: we mapped the volunteer journey. We began by identifying two key personas, as follows:

  • New Science Communicator with Potential—This persona represented a PhD student who was bursting with ideas but lacked structure and confidence.
  • Work Titan—This persona describes an accomplished scientist who was juggling multiple high-impact projects and was too busy to mentor newcomers.

Both personas represented crucial members of this NGO ’s ecosystem, but they rarely interacted in meaningful ways. The Work Titans needed people with fresh voices to whom they could pass the torch. The New Science Communicators needed guidance, structure, and direction, so they had difficulty collaborating in ways that were in sync with their broader goals.

Next, we looked at the volunteer journey—from application to active participation—to see where volunteer engagement had dropped off, as follows:

  • Application & Vetting—This was a high point. Our rigorous selection process made people feel validated when they joined us. They were excited, hopeful, and eager to contribute.
  • Post-Joining Experience—After acceptance, there was no clear path forward. New members weren’t sure where to start, how to get involved, or who to talk to.
  • First Organizational Meetings—The annual NGO meeting should have been a moment of connection and shared purpose. Instead, experienced members often dominated vague, inaccessible discussions.

Figures 1 and 2 show the volunteer journey before and after we made changes.

Figure 1—The volunteer journey before making changes
The volunteer journey before making changes
Figure 2#—The volunteer journey after making changes
The volunteer journey after making changes

After the initial wave of excitement, volunteers found themselves without adequate direction. There were no clear next steps. There was no structure for onboarding new volunteers. There was no roadmap to show newcomers how to go from being an interested participant to an active contributor.

This was a painful realization. We were so focused on serving external communities that we neglected our own internal ecosystem. One thing was clear: we needed to design an experience that guided volunteers into meaningful participation.

Designing a Better Volunteer Experience

So we redesigned the experience from the ground up, using the following process:

  1. We introduced a buddy system. We paired every new volunteer with a mentor—someone who had already navigated the process and could provide practical, real-world guidance.
  2. We structured the engagement path. Instead of expecting volunteers to magically figure out where they fit, we built a clear, step-by-step roadmap taking volunteers through the following stages:
    • beginner-level opportunities to participate in low-pressure engagements such as pre-recorded podcasts
    • intermediate challenges such as supporting existing projects
    • high-stakes leadership roles such as doing TV interviews and leading their own initiatives
  3. We redesigned our NGO meetings. Volunteers could see a clear trajectory of progress through our gamified growth path. Instead of holding vague discussions, we introduced the following:
    • prestructured agendas so volunteers knew what was coming
    • breakout discussions that encouraged participation
    • actionable next steps—leaving people with a sense of progress rather than just another meeting

The Moment Everything Clicked

The transformation wasn’t immediate, but when it happened, we could feel it. Volunteers stopped asking what they should do because they already knew. New members arrived and immediately felt connected. After the first week of being part of the group, volunteers already had activities lined up, opportunities to contribute through radio interviews, options to join existing projects, and ways to learn practical science-communications skills from seasoned colleagues. Engagement went up. Burnout went down. Then, the pandemic hit.

Designing for a Crisis: An Unexpected Test for Our Volunteer System

The pandemic forced us to rethink everything. Suddenly, all our training and all our projects were virtual. However, because we had already designed a structured, scalable engagement model, transitioning to an online community wasn’t a crisis, merely an expansion.

Instead of in-person training, we launched a remote-first, peer-learning model in which scientists helped each other produce short educational videos for social media. This worked better than we had imagined. Consider the following outcomes:

  • Sixty scientists, never meeting in person, produced over 200 educational videos.
  • Some of these videos reached millions of viewers.
  • Engagement was higher than for our pre-pandemic, in-person events.

Because we had designed a strong community structure, our volunteer system didn’t collapse under pressure—it evolved.

The Bigger Lesson: Service Design Isn’t a Luxury—It ’s a Necessity

NGOs don’t fail because of a lack of passion. They fail because passion alone isn’t enough. They struggle when their systems aren’t designed for sustainability, volunteers don’t know where they fit, engagement isn’t structured, and internal communities are afterthoughts.

But when NGOs do service design right:

  • Volunteers don’t just stay, they thrive.
  • Engagement doesn’t just happen, it compounds over time.
  • The organization doesn’t merely function, it scales.

The bottom line? Every NGO designs service experiences—whether intentionally or not. The question is: Are those experiences helping them grow or holding them back?

Obviously, the lack of internal service design is not only an NGO problem. Even though most corporate teams would never launch a product without designing a clear user experience, how many companies treat their employees like their internal customers? How many employees need to navigate internal structures on their own? How many companies design their internal communities in the same way they design their customer journeys?

Here’s the thing: every organization has an internal service ecosystem, and every company, just like an NGO, can benefit from designing it better.

Conclusion

Service design is a necessity, not a luxury. The people who do an organization’s work—whether they are volunteers, employees, or students—should be treated like customers, and the organization’s internal systems should serve them well.

Don’t wait for a crisis or organizational setback to land on your doorstep to learn how poorly designed your service ecosystem is. Well-designed services and ecosystems often shine most brightly during difficult times by providing a safety net for their users. But achieving effective service design takes effort and a commitment not to settle for solutions that might lack the resiliency to withstand the slightest disruption.

Magda learned this imperative lesson through her NGO efforts. We hope there are some takeaways that you can apply to your own work. Do you have any service-design lessons that have helped your organization—whether within an NGO or a commercial enterprise? If so, please share them in the comments! 

Director of User Experience at Rockwell Automation

Cleveland, Ohio, USA

Jonathan WalterJon has a degree in Visual Communication Design from the University of Dayton, as well as experience in Web development, interaction design, user interface design, user research, and copywriting. He spent eight years at Progressive Insurance, where his design and development skills helped shape the #1 insurance Web site in the country, progressive.com. Jon’s passion for user experience fueled his desire to make it his full-time profession. Jon joined Rockwell Automation in 2013, where he designs software products for some of the most challenging environments in the world. Jon became User Experience Team Lead at Rockwell in 2020, balancing design work with managing a cross-functional team of UX professionals, then became a full-time User Experience Manager in 2021. In 2022, Jon was promoted to Director of User Experience at Rockwell.  Read More

Manager of Customer Experience System at Rockwell Automation

Portsmouth, New Hampshire, USA

Magda JagielskaMagda is a service designer and CX strategist with a background in complex systems science, corporate innovation, and nonprofit leadership. For over a decade, she has helped organizations—from startups to Fortune 500 companies and NGOs—improve how they design services, enhance customer experiences, and scale innovation. As Manager of Customer Experience Systems at Rockwell Automation, she leads enterprise-wide service design initiatives to improve the customer experience. Previously, she has played a key role in launching the Visa Innovation Center in Warsaw, led corporate intrapreneurship programs, and cofounded an award-winning science communications NGO.  Read More

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