Connecting the next generation of American Pyschiatrists with national support.
Driving strategic membership insights to boost retention for early-career psychiatrists, executing a targeted campaign playbook.
Redefining the APA’s digital experience to retain early-career psychiatrists—shifting from academic perks to real-world utility to protect the future pipeline of US mental health care.
APA was experiencing a significant retention cliff. As Resident-Fellow Members (RFMs) transitioned into Early Career Psychiatrists (ECPs), their membership dues increased while their perceived value plummeted. The business was losing revenue because ECPs viewed membership as "just something semi-mandatory to put on my CV" rather than a daily utility.
Stakeholder landscape: Engaging with highly stressed, time-poor medical professionals facing severe burnout, high student debt, and the overwhelming logistical transition from academia to private practice.
Constraints: Executing a massive strategic pivot while managing conflicting feedback on political/advocacy priorities (e.g., Nurse Practitioner scope creep).
Survey: 187 psychiatric professionals, specifically targeting Resident-Fellow Members (RFMs) and Early Career Psychiatrists (ECPs).
Synthesis approach: Created comparative word clouds of core values between segments. Ranked and mapped the heaviest career challenges (burnout, debt, time management) directly to UX interventions.
Novel or adapted methods: Adapted standard UX discovery to act as deep sociological research, exploring the mental health, financial trauma, and burnout of psychiatric professionals to design a hyper-empathetic retention campaign.
Research Plan
Findings Presentation
Findings that surprised stakeholders: Discovered that APA was asking for membership renewals at the exact moment Early Career Professionals faced peak financial vulnerability (waiting for jobs, buying homes, managing student debt). Also surprised leadership with the finding that young psychiatrists don't network inside the APA platform—they use Facebook and WhatsApp. Unprompted, 31% of users voiced deep frustration that APA wasn't advocating against Nurse Practitioner scope creep, revealing a massive messaging gap.
Experience-based creation: Designed a digital retention campaign playbook and member-journey framework tailored to Early Career Psychiatrists (ECPs).
Key design decisions with rationale: Overruled the client's assumption that promoting academic perks (like textbook discounts) would drive retention. My data proved that ECPs were fundamentally exhausted, in debt, and seeking practical career guidance, shifting the entire UX and content strategy toward empathetic, transition-focused messaging.
Moments I changed direction: I advised the client to stop forcing users into their outdated, internal networking platform. My research revealed that young psychiatrists were already successfully networking on WhatsApp and Facebook. I pivoted the strategy to support organic networking rather than forcing adoption of a "clunky" internal tool.
Cross-department collaboration: Partnered with the Associate Creative Director, Marketing Strategists, and Visual Designers to translate deep qualitative user research directly into targeted social and digital campaign assets.
Campaign Assets
Thank you for looking through my work!
More projects are right here >>