Girls on the Run
Girls on the Run
UPMC Magee-Women’s Hospital
Embedded Files
Fall 2025- Spring 2026
How can we...
appeal to a larger demographics of coaches while also ensuring inclusivity?
understand current and past coaches and utilize their experience to improve recruitment?
use intentionally designed visuals to persuade coaches to join GOTR?
Project Lead
Skylar Wang
Team Members
Amy Cha, Maithili Chaudhari, Annabelle Chow, Inseo Kim, Varrshitha Kumar, Chloe Xu
Community Partner
Girls on the Run UPMC Magee-Women’s Hospital
Overview
A mobile platform that facilitates connections between youth and their peers
A mobile platform that facilitates connections between youth and their peers
^ general description of your solution
main how can we statement
what is general solution
main image
Context
Working with Girls on the Run
Working with Girls on the Run
Girls on the Run (GOTR) is a non-profit organization focused on developing young girls’ confidence, character, and friendships through curriculum-based activities and running.
For our project, we worked with the Girls on the Run Magee-Womens Hospital of UPMC, which serves most of Western Pennsylvania.
Our project goal is to support the UPMC branch in their coach recruitment and to increase the program's reach for recruiting coaches and more students.
Research
Understanding the coach experience
Understanding the coach experience
Expert Interview with coaches
In order to better understand the needs of Girls on The Run, we conducted an expert interview with 3 of the organizers of the GOTR UPMC Magee branch. We asked questions about their current process for recruiting coaches, coach pain points, resources for coaches, and how they currently measure the success of coach recruitment.
Surveys with coaches and volunteers
To gain a broader consensus on what motivates individuals to volunteer or coach and how recruitment and outreach materials can be improved, we conducted a Google Forms survey with past season coaches, recieving 30 responses.
Site Visit to ECS Fair
We visited the ECS Fair to gain further understanding of the recruitment process and examine the content of the promotional material being used. We were able to observe interactions between the GOTR team and interested families, and brainstorm ways to increase engagement.
Modeling
Synthesizing stakeholder needs based on our research
Synthesizing stakeholder needs based on our research
how did you represent your findings visually (what models did you make)
affinity diagrams, personas, customer journey maps, etc.
Upon conducting preliminary research, we synthesized stakeholder needs through user journey mapping, and affinity diagramming.
IMMERSE step
Reframe
Narrowing down the problem space
Narrowing down the problem space
After conducting expert interviews and analyzing the User Journey Map, we identified a significant gap between coach motivation and the content of recruitment material. We also encountered misconceptions on the nature of the organization from interested parties.
why did you decide to focus on this problem
Reframe step
How Can We Statements
How Can We Statements
How can we appeal to a larger demographic of coaches while also ensuring inclusivity?
How can we understand current and past coaches and utilize their experience to improve recruitment?
How can we use intentionally designed visuals to persuade coaches to join GOTR?
Design Goals
Design Goals
Communicate GOTR’s impact and mission visually
Reduce barriers to entry and sign up friction
Design for inclusivity
Build trust through transparency and clear expectations
Ideate
Synthesizing stakeholder needs based on our research
Synthesizing stakeholder needs based on our research
Crazy 8s
Crazy 8s
After brainstorming 8 ideas each using Crazy 8s, and sorting them by clustering them together with other similar ideas, we sorted them into an Impact-Effort Matrix, with the x-axis being low-effort to high-effort, and the y-axis being low-impact to high-impact.
Using these, we identified three core concepts and created related storyboards.
Visual-heavy Promotional Materials
Visual-heavy Promotional Materials
Appeal to emotion and facilitate sign-up process
Refine Existing Posters
Refine Existing Posters
Focus on two uses:
Site visits/promotional needs
Take-homes for students
Short-form Videos
Short-form Videos
Capture authentic moments from Girls on the Run programs.
Build
Creating promotional material
Creating promotional material
Low Fidelity
Coach motivation-focused posters
Coach motivation-focused posters
Audience-specific posters
Audience-specific posters
Take-home brochures
Take-home brochures
Day-in-the-life diagrams
Day-in-the-life diagrams
Test
User Testing with Coaches
User Testing with Coaches
Testing involved A/B testing to identify which quotes most accurately reflected the motivations of the past/current coaches to appeal to individuals who share the same values and intrinsic motivations. A/B testing and the think-aloud method were used to compare images that best reflected the user identity and the mentorship aspect of coaching.
Final Product
High-fidelity Promotional Material
High-fidelity Promotional Material
The material was transferred over to Canva with interactive elements, ensuring that the GOTR team will be able to easily edit the content on their end.
Student Poster
Student Poster
Coach Poster
Coach Poster
Quotes Poster
Quotes Poster
Day in the life Posters
Day in the life Posters
Front
Back
Take-home Brochure
Take-home Brochure
Reflection
Bridging coach motivations and experiences with the promotional material
Bridging coach motivations and experiences with the promotional material
After working with UPMC GOTR for this past school year, we were able to take on a very unique design challenge. Beyond just the marketing materials themselves, we had to do a deep dive into the inner workings of the program and really understand the coaches themselves. A lot of the work we did was understanding the motivations and draw coaches originally had that drew them to program and translating that to marketable content. In this process of understanding our demographic, it really helped highlight the value of user interviews and how to guide conversations to better understand people’s personal motivations.
Moreover, there was relatively a lot of creative liberty that we could take with this project, so clearly defining strategies and promotional material, while also managing the overall scope was part of the experience in working on this collaboration. Using these specific ideation strategies, we were able to explore more, while also having a clear standard on how to narrow our scope.
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