Clear Direction, Real Change

Executive leadership selected Kristen to lead a ten-month organizational technology transition. The work required moving staff, files, and departmental systems while creating a structure the organization could manage long after launch.

Kristen led a six-person implementation team and created the transition plan across 21 Microsoft Teams environments. She worked directly with staff across nine functional areas to determine what files needed to move, where they belonged, who required access, and how each team needed to work after the transition.

She developed the Microsoft Launch Playbook, designed and taught six live 90-minute training sessions, and created a Microsoft Champions program that gave staff immediate departmental support without placing every request on the organization’s two-person IT team.

The project moved files for 87 staff, eliminated more than 40,000 outdated external sharing permissions, and established long-term governance standards. A partner organization later asked Kristen for recommendations to guide its own Microsoft 365 migration.

The location had available space and an opportunity to serve more households, but expanding every program internally would have required additional money and staff capacity.

Kristen created a partnership model that connected outside organizations with established programs and resources to the location’s underused space. She developed the relationships and structured partnerships that allowed both sides to contribute what they already had.

Within six months, the number of outside program partners grew from one to seven. Participation at the location increased 41%, more than 300 households were served each month, and the growth required no additional organizational spending.

A new location needed enough people and leadership capacity to support more than 600 participants each week. Most of the people joining the team had never volunteered before, and the bulk of the recruiting needed to happen within approximately two months.

Kristen built the team and turned a multi-layer leadership model into a functioning system. She drove recruiting, personally developed the leaders, and established a working pipeline from volunteer to team leader to coach to staff. Eight coaches helped support the team leaders.

The result was not simply a larger volunteer roster. It was a layered leadership system capable of distributing responsibility beyond one central leader and sustaining the work after launch. Approximately 96% of the original 170 volunteers were still serving 18 months later, based on roster tracking through September 2022, and four volunteers were promoted to staff. The team kept growing over that period, to about 220 volunteers.

Attendance had been trending downward, so the organization set a goal of holding attendance flat through its annual high-attendance season.

Kristen set the strategy and led the work as a staff leader, turning the goals into clear expectations for her team and keeping the message and approach consistent across all four locations, each with its own size and needs.

Instead of simply stopping the decline, attendance increased 5.5% year over year across all four locations.

People seeking community assistance had to complete paper forms in person, limiting when they could apply and making requests harder to track. The process could take as long as four weeks.

Kristen redesigned and digitized the application process. She eliminated the paper and in-person requirements, made applications available at any time, and created a clearer system for tracking each request through review and resolution.

The new process brought turnaround time to two weeks while making support easier to access and administer.