Smithsonian Affiliations builds long term partnerships with museums, educational institutions, and cultural organizations, extending the reach and impact of the Smithsonian across communities.
The Challenge
Smithsonian Affiliations wanted to rethink how it attracted, welcomed, and supported Affiliates while building the internal capability to continually improve those experiences.
Over multiple years, we partnered with the Smithsonian to solve a series of interconnected challenges: helping prospective Affiliates understand the opportunity and apply, strengthening onboarding, and equipping teams across the Smithsonian with practical tools to put DEAI principles into practice.
What We Uncovered
The opportunity was bigger than creating any single tool or experience.
Smithsonian teams needed a repeatable way to understand stakeholders, explore complex challenges, generate ideas, and turn those ideas into useful solutions. By building these skills into the work itself, each project could solve an immediate need while strengthening the team’s ability to innovate going forward.
How We Worked
Across a multiyear partnership, Desklight combined research, strategy, workshops, and hands on problem solving to help Smithsonian teams learn innovation by doing it.
Together, we created a digital learning hub for prospective Affiliates, designed an application experience, developed an onboarding system for new Affiliates, and facilitated workshops to create a DEAI toolkit for the broader Smithsonian Institution.
Throughout the work, we engaged stakeholders directly and equipped teams with practical approaches they could continue using beyond each engagement.
What Changed
The partnership produced a connected set of tools and experiences supporting the Affiliate journey from initial interest through onboarding and ongoing participation.
The work also built lasting innovation capability within the organization. Smithsonian teams gained practical methods for research, collaboration, problem solving, and designing with their stakeholders.
The digital learning hub alone generated 10 times more site traffic in the first months after launch.
Capabilities
Problem Solving Training • Innovation Workshops • Design Research • Facilitation • Experience Strategy • Capability Building
After implementing Desklight’s recommendations, we saw 10x more engagement with our learning platform.
Tricia Edwards
Deputy Director, Smithsonian Affiliations
