Strategy + Design

Role: Strategy and evaluation team member | Creative lead for design, production, and distribution
Organization: Fairfax Community Church

The right question to ask

How do we make it fun and easy for small groups to get started? That was the question that guided this project from the beginning, and it turned out to be the right question to ask.

What wasn’t working

The original GroupLink materials were a standard half-fold booklet with dense paragraphs, no personality, and a format that accidentally worked against the very thing small groups are supposed to do: get people talking to each other. Leaders would open the first meeting by reading from the book. Attendees would follow along. And the chance for something genuinely connective would slip by.

The goal wasn't just to make the booklet look better. It was to make the entire experience work better.

Designing for a feeling, not a format

I was part of a cross-functional design thinking team led by the small group pastor and shaped by people who had actually sat through those first awkward meetings with the old booklet. Using a human-centered design approach, we used sticky notes to map what wasn't working, what we wanted people to feel, and what format would actually serve a group of strangers trying to become community. The goal became turning a boring manual that felt like an orientation guide into something closer to a game night with friends: natural, warm, a shared experience that set the tone for connection and gave people something to build trust on.

The Starter Kit

That process led us to scrap the booklet entirely. Instead, we designed a Starter Kit with everything a group needed to begin: an instruction sheet, six weekly cue cards, conversation starter cards, Post-it notes, and a Sharpie. The colors were bright and the tone playful, intentional signals that this was supposed to be fun, and the card format made engagement the default instead of passive reading.

I took part in every phase of the project: evaluation, brainstorming, content writing, visual design, production, and distribution.

The Starter Kit

When the kit launched at the GroupLink event, I watched groups excitedly grab their boxes on their way out the door, the experience working before the first meeting had even started. What I’m most proud of isn’t the design. It’s that we didn’t stop at redesigning the booklet. We questioned whether the booklet was the right tool at all, and built something better from the ground up.