Citizen Solutions: Tennessee
Product Strategy, Design & Analytics · Builders Movement (then Starts With Us) · 2023
In the wake of the Covenant School shooting in Nashville, Starts With Us — a nonpartisan organization working to overcome toxic polarization — recruited and convened a group of eleven ideologically diverse Tennesseans to develop common ground policy proposals on gun rights and safety. The process they went through became the subject of a documentary, The Tennessee 11, which premiered at the Nashville Film Festival in 2024.
I was brought in to first inform the strategy of, and then design, the platform that brought their proposals to the public.
My Role
I was brought in twice. First to lead the strategic kickoff workshop series establishing the principles and strategy that would govern the initiative.
Then, after a month away, I was brought back to replace the designer who had taken the project forward, carry the design across the finish line, and take on daily monitoring, analysis, and reporting of polling outcomes to leadership through the full campaign period.
Throughout, I also worked directly with the developer building a custom back-end CMS, shaping the internal tooling to be usable by the non-technical team who would manage the platform long-term across future initiatives.
The Site
Two principles governed every design decision:
Make providing at least one response as frictionless as possible. The MVP goal was meaningful public engagement at scale — which meant removing every possible barrier between landing on the site and registering a first opinion. Account creation, issue education, and deeper organizational engagement were all secondary to that first interaction.
Use progressive disclosure for everything else. Context about the proposals, expert review, participant voices, the six-step Citizen Solutions process — all of it was available for users who wanted to go deeper, but none of it stood between a visitor and the ability to weigh in.
The polling experience stripped participation down to its simplest possible form: one proposal, stated plainly, with a slider to register position from strongly disagree to strongly agree.
Eight proposals, one at a time, with the option to read more or keep moving.
The "you can change this later" affordance was deliberate — it lowered the stakes of a first response and reduced abandonment.
After weighing in, users landed on an overview of the proposals and their responses — where their individual answers appeared alongside the emerging aggregate sentiment.
Seeing your position in relation to the broader public is both engaging and the point: this was a civic experiment, and the results were the content.
This was also where, after completing the poll, users could go back in and add written commentary for their answers for the Tennessee Eleven to consider when they reconvened.
Each proposal had its own page, accessible any time throughout the polling experience, for users who wanted the full context: a summary, detailed policy rationale reviewed by a panel of experts for accuracy and feasibility, and direct quotes from the Tennessee 11 participants who created the proposals.
The expert review layer gave the proposals credibility without obscuring the citizen voices at the center of the project.
Supporting pages brought the humans at the center of the process to the forefront and provided deeper information about the process.
Measuring the Results
For the duration of the campaign, I maintained a daily reporting dashboard tracking engagement across Tennessee and the broader US — unique weigh-ins, proposal-level sentiment, demographic composition of ad-driven users, and county-level participation across all 95 Tennessee counties. Delivered to leadership every weekday by noon.
The county breakdown wasn't just a count — it was a tiered threshold system showing exactly how deeply each county was engaged, which directly informed decisions about where to concentrate remaining campaign effort and spend.
The Numbers
unique weigh-ins from Tennessee
30,267
All 95
Tennessee counties represented
avg responses per user, more than double target
5.5
78%
welcome email open rate against a 60% baseline
total responses across the US
4.7M
impressions across Google and Meta
207,607
Six of eight proposals achieved majority support.
The results were delivered to the session participants, incorporated into the final proposals, and used to demonstrate — at scale — that citizens across the political spectrum could find more common ground than the loudest voices in the room suggested.