Over the coming weeks, we’ll be taking a look at the members of CUNY PIT Lab’s inaugural advisory board: six individuals brought together to help strengthen our capacity and continue to pursue our mission of making technology accessible, sustainable, and equitable for all.
This week, we spoke to Renée Westmoreland. Renée is a senior UX and digital leader inspired by design that works. Her career is focused on creating digital experiences for mission-driven audiences — work centered on transforming complexity into clarity, turning data and information into elegant, intuitive experiences that people can easily navigate and trust.
At Candid, Renée managed user experience for SaaS platforms and digital resources, leading a team of designers, researchers, instructional designers, and editors. She led the design process for unifying multiple legacy platforms into a single product serving millions of nonprofit professionals, as well as the development of digital solutions providing news and education to the social sector. She co-led the development of the Candid brand and its launch when Foundation Center and GuideStar joined forces in 2019. At Foundation Center, she oversaw the design and development of numerous websites, including Foundation Directory, Philanthropy News Digest, and a series of issue-based sites illustrating the vital work of philanthropy.
Renée first connected with nonprofit work in high school as a volunteer for a therapeutic riding program and began her professional career at GMHC — the nation’s largest service organization for people living with HIV/AIDS — where she launched the organization’s first website. Renée holds a B.S. in Advertising from the University of Florida’s College of Journalism and serves on the boards of WebServes and the CUNY PIT Lab.
What are you hoping to contribute in your new role on our advisory board?
The first part is understanding how the advisory board can help. I’ve worked in the nonprofit sector for my whole career and in technology in nonprofit sector for most of it. So for me, I’m interested in understanding what projects can be created or executed that help to democratize access to technology. There’s a lot that is obviously changing in technology very rapidly with AI. But the sort of fundamental access to technology for nonprofits and the people that they serve remains a challenge, because technology is such an enormous piece of communication and news; the use of technology in the distribution of accurate information is an area that’s really important to me.
You were in charge of the design of Candid Learning website, which is incredibly impressive! How has your experience in UX taught you about how design can influence the way that people learn, and the way that people develop their skills?
That’s something that has evolved a lot. My first experience working with online learning was probably back in the early 2000s, with the first implementation. I oversaw several iterations of our learning website. The first original one was something called GrantSpace that evolved into Candid Learning. But as we chose a new platform for our learning, the need arose from the evolution of learning management systems. This is sort of inside baseball, but a lot of learning systems, the core of them is actually designed for HR training requirements. And what we learned was that that’s not the learning model that we were following, right? So, over time, those applications have evolved to become distinct in terms of the different kinds of learning that they’re trying to achieve. And ours was much more akin to customer education. So part of our goals with the redesign was helping nonprofits understand the concepts that would help them with sustainability, writing proposals, getting grants, and then also using our products to help them do that. So product education was a piece of it, but part of the evolution was out of our hands. Part of it happened during COVID, where everything moved online, and the amount of in-person training reduced dramatically, and people really gravitated towards online learning and on-demand learning in particular. That process evolved to contain highly engaging, small chunks of content that people could work their way through, and then also ways of actually tracking progress, so that people felt like they’re making their way through something to achieve a particular goal.
How do you manage an ongoing educational program given the current dynamic rate of change in technology?
Some of it is [about] understanding SEO. For example, one of the elements of the learning site was a knowledge base [that] had grown to over 200 questions, and with the new site, we brought it back down around 150. We worked with our marketing team on this, because we recognized that Google is going to extract all of that learning information and they’re going to deliver it in their search results. So it could be that those people, if they’re looking for, like, how do I do X, right? If we develop those articles that are a complete library, it’s searchable, they can go on the site and they can do it, but it’s a very likely scenario that they’re gonna ask the question on Google. And then Google is going to take the content from those pages and throw up the answers in their AI summary. And so making sure that we’re creating the content and the search engine optimization at the same time, so that it’s very well-formed for people to use on the site, but that it can also be extracted by AI and the search engines.