Innovation at Planned Parenthood
My team and innovation portfolio (formerly the CoLab) sparks impact-driven innovation across the organization’s health care, education, and advocacy programs by providing tools and expertise to collaborate with new partners and try their biggest ideas.
Skillsets required in this role involved mentoring my team, a handful of startups, academic researchers, and cross-collaborative internal staff to self-organize. By empowering them to co-design culture, processes, and solutions for our core constituents, we helped unlock significant successes for the organization.
We deliver on a mission, vision, and guiding principles with a focus on innovating new solutions for sexual and reproductive healthcare with a central focus on Black, Latinx, and LGBTQ+ communities, and scale to ensure we encompass any and all who enter our doors - digital or physical. We operate under a strong ethical framework, promoting inclusivity, and are observant while also offering support to each other and the communities we serve. Simultaneously, we uphold the rigor to meet our engagement-centric KPIs. For anyone who works with Innovation, we arm them with data to become magnetic storytellers and inspire others to join us in our mission.
Successes
Org Wins
Launched Spot On en Español and garnered over 20K Spanish-first users.
We taught sex education differently—without us as the experts and with more learning from real-life stories from diverse voices and cast members in sketches like Roo High School and Spot On Nightly, which helped garner awards from Fast Co and the Shorty’s.
In three weeks, we launched the Bans Off Our Bodies / Basta De Controlarnos campaign and garnered over 3.8M visitors to the site, 1M folks to march, and over $1M in donations in two weeks. Most importantly, we made policy change. Because of this, in less than a year, we saw pro-abortion wins in states like Kansas.
Our innovation team partnered with our internal product team and external startups to help make abortions accessible. With innovative and simple iterations of our website and service locator, we helped over 2 million information seekers and nearly 2000 abortion patients obtain financial and emotional support.
Currently, we’re creating evaluation frameworks for 2 -3 conversational prototypes using GenAI, are partnering with Cornell Tech to build an ML model to train our chatbot Roo, and are deeply involved in our organization and ecosystem’s governance discussions on GenAI.
Industry Wins
As I lead Product and Innovation, we have attained over 25 earned media acknowledgments. These range from prestigious accolades like the Webby and Effie Awards to featured articles in well-regarded publications like Healthline and exclusive invitations to participate in panel discussions at industry-leading events like CES, HLTH, and SXSW.
Management Wins
I received high 360 feedback scores from direct reports, peers, and my manager on leading change, accountability, fostering relationships, and developing people.
Built trust in our way of working and grew our innovation process into an org-wide initiative.
