Research

Throughout my first year at New America, I was plagued by the question of why more legal permanent residents weren’t naturalizing. The data showed that Green Card holders were growing in number, but the naturalization rates had been fairly stagnant. A number of the nonprofits I’d worked with were naturalizing immigrants and had a lot of anecdotal information as to why they thought folks weren’t naturalizing, but there wasn't a lot of qualitative data. So we set out to learn more about what might be preventing people from naturalizing and what we could propose that would improve naturalization rates.

We received a grant to conduct this user research and, over the course of five months, a small team traveled across the country, where we interviewed 63 immigrants and citizens, conducted 117 surveys, and set up various testing sessions. We spoke to dozens of subject matter experts, attended workshops and English classes, and learned a lot about the immigration space. We worked hard to make sure the organizations we worked with and recruited interviewees alongside understood our research and how it could help them. Our research created a report, a series of wireframes, and other tools that are being used by nonprofits today.

How to work alongside nonprofits that are stretched to capacity

Immigration organizations are stretched thin. The current political climate has immigrants feeling particularly vulnerable and the nonprofits in the ecosystem are doing their best to fill an ever-dwindling safety net. Your work with them should never stand in the way of the work they do to assist their community.

There are a few ways you’ll interact with immigration nonprofits, likely through naturalization workshops, classes, or during legal intake. But you may also find yourself assisting them during a crisis. The naturalization workshop you’ve been waiting for all month may not have stellar attendance, but you’ve got to roll with the punches. The folks who are coming in for help are usually in vulnerable positions and will not be the “perfect” user. In my experience, folks coming into immigration nonprofits for assistance vary in age, English mastery, and tech acumen. There is generally no perfect user, but you’ll likely be able to identify patterns that lead to archetypes or personas.

Advice:

• When you’re doing any sort of user research, approach the community with empathy and great care. Never push folks to talk to you. Remember that the organization you’re working with is vouching for you and you’re now a part of the trust they’ve built with the community.
• Lend a hand. If you’re at a workshop and speak another language, offer to translate. If they need a hand copying files, commandeer the copying machine. When helping folks with service design transformation, you learn a lot about how an organization operates and what they prioritize. Take these as an opportunity for active, not passive, learning opportunities.
• If you haven’t spoken to enough folks, wait until after the event to talk to the organization. They’ll likely be sympathetic and want to help you solve this problem.

Finding a home for your work

Whether building, designing, or conducting research, your work should be sustainable beyond your time with the organization. How do you make sure your contribution continues to be useful even after you no longer work in the space? In government, we had to hand our work off to contractors or programmatic offices for maintenance. In the nonprofit world, this is much harder. If we ever thought our work could not continue without us, we abandoned that approach and found a better one. How do you ensure folks will maintain or champion the work after you’ve completed your project?

Advice:

• Find the organizations in the space that are amplifiers for your work. The New Americans Campaign and the National Partnership for New Americans are national organizations made up of immigration nonprofits that work on a variety of issues, including naturalization. Each group has been a great partner to us. We’ve worked with each to share our report findings with their members and make our work a part of their best practices. Finding groups like them will help ensure that your work is reached by a much wider group than otherwise would have seen it.
• Think about necessary funding early and often. You may want to consider identifying foundations that work in the space and talking to them about understanding the usefulness of your project.
• You’re unlikely to find an immigration nonprofit that can handle the maintenance of a new piece of technology you’ve developed for them. First, question if it’s absolutely necessary to build a new tool for them. If it is, then make sure you either find funding for others to help them maintain it or be willing to spend time needed in the months and years to come helping them with issues that may come up.