Executive Summary
Each year thousands of college students applied for a much sought after internship at Gallagher. The company took great pride in its internship program and looked to continually improve the experience. A new HR team was formed to improve the intern program and was looking for ways to better understand the intern experience.
Challenge
How might we collect qualitative and quantitative data for 400 hundred interns and understand the intern’s goals, motivations, and pain points in order to improve the overall Gallagher intern experience.
Results
If nothing else we collected enough pictures to provide brochure material for the next 100 years. However, in addition we collected thousands of touchpoint across a span of 10 days. Providing insight into the positive and negative events throughout their day, spawning two new initiatives. The first was to expand the study to Gallagher’s “G-Caps” employees in their first three years of employment. The second was a support program for interns who were experiencing emotional challenges.
The Details
This was a very important challenge for the Experience Design team and we had to be sure we were ready. Before we started the intern study, we created all of our materials. This include documentation about the study and how it would be performed, a presentation deck for the leadership and for the interns themselves. We presented all these materials to the marketing team and asked them to be our test subjects.
Two things happened as a result. First, we took the results and updated our documentation and approach based and got ready for the real thing. Next we reviewed the initial results with the HR team and they were so excited that they asked to expand the study from 100 to 400 interns.
Collecting Data
Using the ExperienceFellow to perform mobile ethnographic research we collected data from interns depicting their experiences and related satisfaction for 10 days.
Participants “checked-in” as often as they liked and were encouraged to document all positive, neutral or negative aspects of their experience during their internship. All they had to do was pick a touchpoint, name it, and rate it. For example “finding the stairs in the building” and then rate how they feel in that moment with an emoji. Each moment was time-stamped and tagged. Interns could also attach photos, videos, or comments as supporting data.
Participant Incentives
A daily raffle was run to encourage participation for the duration of the study. To be entered in the drawing participants had to use the app twice per day. For the first day we had very few participants, and we thought maybe they didn’t believe the rewards were real or worth the effort.
However, one to the teams principles was document everything and as we presented the first days winner, the team also took a photograph and sent it an email announcing the winner along with a reminder to participate. The following day study participation increased to 95%. Of course, for the remainder of the study we sent a email with a photo of each day’s winner.
Initial results
As you can imaging we got a ton of data, the sample below is from a single day.
Creating Perspectives
We used ExperienceFellow’s editing tool to work with the raw data and arranged them into a complete intern journey. It was a massive undertaking and took the team about six weeks to pull together.
The readout
It was a big day for the team. We put together an amazing presentation and it was all hands thing. I couldn’t have been more proud as the team shared out the results and their insight.
As I mentioned, the HR team was very pleased and as the subject matter experts took a copy of the data for themselves. They used the data to inform the structure of the intern program and asked that we expand the study to include the “G-Caps” interns who had gone full time and were in their first three years of employment.
So many thanks
To the great Experience Design team for their hard work and dedication and to the interns for their participation and the occasional hilarious photo. However, mostly to the HR team that trusted us with this important initiative.