Types of enablement engagements

The Constituent Experience Center of Excellence (CX COE) partners with teams and organizations that want to understand and improve constituents’ experiences and grow their constituent-centered design skills. We do this through enablement engagements.

What is an enablement engagement?

In an enablement engagement, we collaborate with you to meet your goals and grow your team's constituent-centered design skills and practices. We embed with your team, do work together, or provide guidance and targeted support as your team does the work.

Enablement engagements are collaborative. We focus on real problems and goals, while building skills and capacity through hands-on work. 

Enablement engagements typically include a mix of:

  • Collaborative delivery: We work with you on a real initiative
  • Skill-building: We teach and practice methods together
  • Guidance and coaching: We help you make decisions, build repeatable practices, and create learning and growth plans

We support leaders, program managers, and delivery staff alike, helping you get started with constituent-centered design and grow individual, team, and organizational XDR capabilities over time. 

Four types of enablement engagements

Content design and strategy

For teams that publish information for constituents and want it to be easier to find, understand, and use.

What we can do together:

  • Identify top tasks and top content that matter most to constituents
  • Improve information architecture and webpage structure
  • Evaluate, optimize, and align content across touchpoints and channels
  • Rewrite and simplify content for the intended audience
  • Establish content governance and an ongoing maintenance plan

Common outcomes:

  • Clearer, more usable content for constituents
  • A prioritized backlog of content fixes and improvements across channels
  • Repeatable workflows (roles, review steps, quality checks)

Experience research

For teams that want to learn what’s working (or not) in a service, process, or digital experience and what to improve first.

What we can do together:

  • Plan research around your decisions (what you need to learn, by when)
  • Conduct constituent interviews, experience tests, or journey mapping
  • Analyze what you learn and turn it into actionable recommendations
  • Establish lightweight experience research practices your team can continue

Common outcomes:

  • Evidence-backed insights about constituent needs and pain points
  • Practical recommendations and prioritized improvements
  • A practical experience research approach that your team can build into everyday work

Build an XDR team

For organizations that want to grow in-house capability in experience design and research (XDR), including research, design, and content strategy roles.

What we can do together:

  • Assess your current capacity and the skillsets you need
  • Define roles and responsibilities for XDR work
  • Share sample job descriptions and support hiring and onboarding
  • Help establish ways of working (intake, prioritization, research/design practices)

Common outcomes:

  • A practical plan to build or scale your XDR capability
  • Clear roles, job descriptions, and hiring guidance
  • Stronger collaboration between XDR, delivery, and program teams

Consult and learn

For teams that want expert guidance, coaching, or targeted learning to integrate constituent-centered best practices into an initiative.

What we can do together:

  • Help define success measures for constituent experience
  • Consult on strategy, approach, scope, and sequencing
  • Facilitate workshops to align teams and build shared understanding
  • Support decision-making with CX best practices and practical templates

Common outcomes:

  • Faster alignment and clearer decisions
  • Increased confidence using constituent-centered methods
  • Better integration of research, design, and content practices into delivery

Example enablement engagements

We’ve worked with many organizations at different levels. You might be building a new webpage or embarking on a major initiative that requires reorganizing teams, learning new skills, and hiring new roles.

Examples based on real enablement engagements we’ve facilitated:

  • You’re overseeing the launch of a new application. You want help gathering requirements, writing an RFQ, and making sure you deliver for constituents.
  • You want to analyze and act on the feedback constituents leave after interacting with your call center.
  • You were recently put in charge of your organization’s web content. It’s outdated and you’ve heard people can’t find what they need. You want to learn how to manage it and update it.
  • You want to improve something your team manages (a website, process, or service). You’ve heard that testing with constituents really helps, but you don’t know where to begin.
  • Your team publishes a lot of technical content. You want to run a workshop for your staff that focuses on how to make that content easier for its intended audience to understand.
  • You want to map your internal operations and find opportunities to simplify them   

What to expect when you contact us

We’ll usually start by learning:

  • What you’re trying to achieve (your goals and constraints)
  • Who your constituents are and what they’re trying to do
  • Where you are today (team capacity, timeline, current pain points)
  • What kind of enablement support fits best

We may recommend starting small and then scaling what works — so your team builds sustainable capability, not one-time fixes.

Our goal is to provide practical support that extends beyond a single project through tools, training, and coaching. 

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