David Kim, AARP

As VP of multicultural markets, my first task was to outreach to hard-to-reach segments of that population – limited- and non-English speaking Asian immigrants. ethnoworks custom designed research plan provided results that showed us how our organization could best to open up this complex market.

Loel Solomon, Kaiser Permanente

Ethnoworks worked closely with the Kaiser Permanente Community Benefit team to design a simulation that helped several hundred KP leaders understand more deeply the challenges faced by our low income members, and others for whom healthcare is not always the number one priority.   This exercise opened our hearts and minds, and it played a major role in building support for KP’s Total Health agenda. Ethnoworks did a great job grounding this exercise in solid ethnographic research and brought sophistication and great values to the project. And they were a pleasure to work with.

John Sherry, Intel

I’ve done quite a bit of ethnographic research in corporate settings and was really interested in how you provide that richness to other stakeholders in the organization without having them going out and doing the fieldwork themselves. One of the things I really liked about the ethnoworks immersion was that it provided some of the benefits of fieldwork, of being out in the field, of encountering people in their natural settings, but without all the long hours of shadowing, the blind leads, and all the things that go along with fieldwork.  In a very compressed way, the immersion does a great job of giving people a fieldwork experience without having to go through all the actual fieldwork itself.

Sandi Baber, Baber Healthcare Consulting

An immersion exercise is different than reading a book or reading an article in the paper because you actually put yourself into the life of whomever it is that you’re getting this immersion about and you have to live it. I think for people who are trying to make things different or to start something new, immersion is the way to do it.  Because you’re not just assuming something, you’re actually living it.

Erica Whinston, Qualcomm

There’s no way to know the challenges that the people face without trying to live, as much as you can, in their shoes. I think that the immersion is wonderful because it’s an innovative way to experience something and really understand needs.  It’s much more effective than reading any paper or having somebody even tell you about it.  It’s about walking in somebody’s shoes.