Speaking Success into Existence at The Sensemakers Club

When Abby Covert started The Sensemakers Club (SMC), she had a vision: a space where people could explore ideas, find clarity, and grow together. Six months in, the community was thriving, but behind the scenes, she was juggling too much trying to define membership tiers, keep up with content, and figure out how to talk about the club in a way that made sense to both new and existing members. She was building something great but struggling to articulate it in a way that could support its growth.

From the beginning, our work wasn’t just about marketing or messaging, it was about giving Abby the language she needed to run her business with more ease. Words became the tools to simplify decisions, streamline content, and bring clarity to how she communicated SMC’s value.

Laying the Foundation with the MGoT Workbook & Analysis

Before we could refine messaging, we needed to uncover the deeper patterns driving Abby’s work. To do this, she completed the Money Grows On Trees (MGoT) Workbook, a tool designed to help leaders synthesize their purpose, strategy, and direction.

Through this process, Abby outlined:

• Her core intentions as a leader and business owner.

• Her beliefs about success, money, and growth.

• The values she wanted SMC to embody in the long term.

• The audience she felt most drawn to serve.

Once she completed the workbook, I conducted an MGoT analysis, identifying patterns in how she described SMC’s impact, the struggles she observed in her members, and the aspirations that kept coming up. The insights from this exercise laid the foundation for everything that followed. We weren’t guessing what SMC needed but instead pulling directly from Abby’s own words and experiences to shape a communication strategy that felt authentic and true.

The workbook process gave us a concrete starting point, showing where Abby’s messaging was strong and where it needed refinement. Most importantly, it made clear that while SMC was framed around “sensemaking together through conversations,” its deepest value was in serving people actively navigating change and looking for structured support.

Positioning: Defining the Core Audience

With the workbook insights in hand, we moved into defining who SMC was for. At first, SMC’s messaging was broad, centered around the process of sensemaking. But that was too broad. Through our conversations, Abby realized that her core audience was curious people and, more specifically, professionals in transition – people navigating career shifts, creative pivots, or personal reinvention.

This shift in focus clarified SMC’s role and purpose. It wasn’t just about gathering for discussions, it was about offering a space where mutual aid and accountability grounded ideas and made them possible. Abby developed four internal positioning statements—not for public use, but as messaging anchors. These statements defined different types of sensemakers and the specific value SMC provided for each of them. This framing made everything clearer:

• What types of membership and programming made the most sense.

• How to structure content and marketing messages.

• How to describe SMC in a way that immediately connected with the right people.

With these statements in place, Abby could clearly understand who she was serving and why.

Narrative: A Communication Map

Once positioning was clear, we created a Narrative Statement – a tool to orient all communication about the club. This wasn’t a tagline or a mission statement; it was a map for Abby to reference anytime she talked about SMC – on her website, in marketing, in interviews, or even in casual conversations.

“We are curious minds who thrive in an online community of peers, blending personal and professional growth through connection and accountability. We allow clarity to move us into action to make sense of the world around us and how we want to show up in it.”

The NS was broad enough to be adaptable but structured enough to ensure consistency across different contexts. It helped Abby stay aligned whenever she explained SMC to potential members, wrote a social media post, or framed a new program.

For purpose-driven organizations, this step is crucial. Many businesses and communities churn out content hoping for engagement and growth, but without synthesizing their vision with their community’s values, their branding remains unclear. By walking through the MGoT workbook, Abby answered the questions that gave me a concrete understanding of what she was experiencing and what she wanted to build. My role was then to guide her in reflecting that vision in her messaging so that her words could do the work for her.

From Clarity to Content & Delegation

With positioning and narrative in place, we turned to content strategy. Abby needed a way to maintain a consistent presence without spending all her time creating posts from scratch. We developed a content calendar that structured daily, weekly, and monthly themes, making it easy to generate relevant content without the overwhelm.

To streamline things even further, we trained an AI model on SMC’s brand voice, allowing Abby to draft content that matched the club’s tone and messaging. This shift dramatically reduced the mental load of content creation, giving her more time to focus on community building.

We also created a brand style guide, ensuring consistency across all public-facing materials. With a defined style, tone, and process in place, Abby has the freedom to completely delegate content creation. What had once been a constant source of stress was now a streamlined system that required no daily effort from her.

Results & Growth

• Nearly 20 new members joined within the first few weeks of refining SMC’s communication.

• Content engagement surged, with a +108% increase in organic social traffic and a +63% increase in referrals.

• Abby no longer needs to create content herself – a process that once drained time and energy is now fully systemized with the capacity to delegate.

• Abby went from spending hours a week on social media to an hour or two a month.

Relief Through Articulation

Beyond strategy and growth, this work was about offering Abby relief – the relief of not sacrificing the long-term vision because of the daily constraints of operations, all while having words that do the work for her. As she put it:

“Your ability to see both the immediate opportunities and long-term vision is exactly why this ongoing conversation with you is so valuable.”

SMC didn’t need a total overhaul, it needed the right words in the right places. By fixing the communication strategy, we gave Abby the structure and clarity she needed to grow, sustain, and confidently share what she built without carrying the burden of daily content creation.

An Easy Way for Entrepreneurs to Create Content

Entrepreneurs have a low tolerance for “just doing the job.” They have the strategic risk-taker energy. The get sh*t done energy.

As I reflect on my 8 year run as a freelancer, I realize that people who hire freelancers are entrepreneurs. Whether they’re directors of organizations, founders of startups, or individuals working on passion projects, they’re often the ones trying something new, willing to and capable of experimentation.

By nature of my graphic and content services, the ppl I’ve worked with all wanted to communicate an idea. But they also had one other commonality…they didn’t have a narrative.

My discovery process always included a simple question, “Is there a big idea or theme you want me to portray or keep in mind?” Their answer across the board would be something a long the lines of, “we’d love to see what you can do on this project, you have creative freedom.” To the point that I started calling one of my packages “creative freedom.” It basically meant that that they didn’t have a guidepost for content.

But they DID have mission statements. And while a mission statement is an internal and external piece that gives *an idea* of what the organization is about, it does nothing for content.

That’s why I started writing a “narrative statement.” (It didn’t have a name at first bc it was just for me.) But now, it’s a fully loaded, compact statement for internal alignment; A navigation tool for conversations, content, and strategies.

A narrative statement is very different from a mission statement. For a narrative statement, function is essential. It shapes meaning like walls shape space. It considers the weight of the word in each phrase, its capacity to hold people, its durability in its environment. It forms edges around an idea and defines relationships between themes.

Like an acronym encases words, a narrative statement encases definition and unfolds into every piece of content an organization needs to reinforce its purpose.

A mission statement is a few sentences with interchangeable words. A narrative statement is a framework. It provides restriction while offering the flexibility and freedom to fully explore within the bounds.

There’s a key difference here that I hope entrepreneurs acknowledge and adapt, before getting too wrapped up in the weeds of operations, that enables sustainable communication and heavily impacts (or even defines) the longevity of their business.

Should I Tell a Story or a Narrative?

When I heard Michael Margolis talk about the difference between Narrative and Story, my mind was blown. He defined narrative as a framework that someone else can see themselves in, whereas a story is about a specific situation in a certain time and place. A story has an end; a narrative scales. An example he gave was the American Dream - an idea people align with.

This distinction explains why some ideas, brands, and movements outlast their creators. A story captures a moment; a narrative builds a shared reality. Stories evoke emotion, narratives invite participation.

I started looking closely at the stories that outlived others in my life, trying to evaluate which ones were narratives. It's true, there are two kinds. Some that bring up feelings and some that I saw myself in like, "this is the kind of person I am." The narratives were mostly religious...about supporting others, confronting deception, etc. or shaped by my parents overcoming a challenge or making pivotal decisions.

I'm fascinated by a narrative's capacity to invite millions and billions of ppl, whether across time generationally, or across space, uniting people in mass. This is exactly why narrative is something I strive to master in my work. It looks like a brand and communication strategy, but it's more powerful than that for me. It's about ppl aligning around truth. And THAT exploration is super exciting!

Intention: A Compass and Magnet

Foundation as a universal concept is something that has fascinated me lately. 

I wasn’t totally satisfied with Google’s definition, “the lowest load-bearing part of a building; an underlying basis or principle.” It differentiated between physical and nonphysical in a way that lost meaning. That’s why I love to look at etymologies. They  get at the crux of the word, the root from which all the evolutions and distributions of the word take direction. 

“Late Middle English: from Old French fondation, from Latin fundatio(n- ), from fundare ‘to lay a base for’.”

I thought about some of the contexts in which the word is used in my life: Buildings—foundation is critical, a matter of life or death. Raising kids—critical, my mom would tell me to set a solid foundation for my kids so they can stay grounded without my micromanaging. Though in very different contexts, the fact that the same word exists in these separate places necessarily means that there’s a parallel to be explored. 

With physical structures, we understand, by witnessing an immediate undeniable truth, the consequence of a lack of foundation–the building falls. With intangible structures, we often copy-cat what is working for others and realize later (usually after the fall) that we didn’t lay a proper base. Whether we are building tangible or intangible structures, we are acting as architects—intentional about our foundation or not.  

Realizing that intention is the common place from which foundation-setters start creating any structure, tangible or intangible, has been awe-inspiring. Shocking in its simplicity: The basis of creation is intention–a creator walks firmly from it, or walks defeated back to it.

I think about how our communities and our businesses start off by way of intention too. How some outlive others and some don’t get to a tangible point past ideation. How, without intention, there's no process of creation at all. 

A clear intention acts as both a compass and a magnet. It guides decisions while attracting opportunities and resources that line up with it. As if we’re on an invisible highway, this GPS tracker keeps us oriented towards our destination. A GPS but better, because every now and then intention activates an acceleration booster where clarity of purpose meets opportunity. As if clarity removes friction and encourages speed. Intention, a GPS but better, because when there are detours or the weather changes, you’re not lost or tossed around between one idea and the other debating what next step makes sense. The clearer the intention, the easier it is to recognize what belongs on your path and what doesn’t.

A GPS but better, because intention sends a message into the future and still leaves you with the element of surprise. You actually have no idea where you’ll end up because the boosters make your growth unpredictable. 

This highway of intention is invisible and the traveler is you, not in a car, but someone trying to run a business, start a project, or a family. As the founder of whatever structure it is, defining your intention releases the code for all the opportunities and resources, the ones peculiarly aligned with what you’re building, to turn your way. Your intention is the application that runs this living, breathing, pulsing organis(m)ation, or structure. 

The only challenge is time. What makes a founder’s message resonate across time? 

Their truth. 

The impact of a clear intention isn’t time-bound when it’s grounded in truth. We see this in books and ideas that have lived for centuries, left behind by people whose message was tied to something universal, something that aligned with the human experience at its core.

Truth has a piercing quality. It cuts through the noise. It’s what connects us, aligns communities, and creates shared purpose. When a founder trusts their own experience, believes their re/action is deeply human, and has the courage to express it, their message will resonate. 

Intention has a subtle yet expansive nature. By understanding it as foundational and crafting it as carefully in intangible structures as we do tangible ones, we unlock its utility and plant resources into our future that offer us boosts… If we trust it.

Story Makes Place

In ‘The Moment’ in a Designer’s Mind, I talked about some basic design considerations for an architect. I broke down the anatomy of a moment based on Abby Covert’s definitions of data, content, and information. I also defined moment as a single potential (from the endless possibilities of “thing” arrangements) in a designer’s mind, occurring in time and space that influences their user’s state of being and leads them into the next potential seamlessly.

In this post, I want to explore what happens when we attach moments to other moments.

The Story 

The Story /n./:  a thoughtfully arranged sequence of moments that model the visitor’s state of being holistically (physical and emotional) when experiencing your Thing.

We use stories to organize moments and to easily refocus our intention for the lives of our visitors. So, really, a story is a structural cue that needs someone with knowledge of sequencing, in the context of that particular design, to arrange the moments; Someone with a unique skill set that sees peculiarities and nuances within the moments that can be connected to form an experience that the visitor will perceive. 

Here’s an example:

My daughters’ room was cluttered. I had placed their dresser behind the door where it was hard to open because their toy chest took up so much space. After getting rid of some toys, I replaced the big toy chest with a smaller one and made room to move the dresser. Voila! They no longer had to squeeze behind the door to get their clothes.

I redesigned the space for the single potential of my daughters opening their drawers hassle-free – this was The Moment. 

The Story I had in mind was that they would come home from school, and after my dramatic reveal: Guess what I did?! they’d go into their bedroom and jump for joy. They’d attempt a cartwheel or take the stickers and paste them on the extra wall space. The next morning, they would open up their drawers hassle-free, get dressed, and go about their day. I’d rest assured that I have no fingers near the door to worry about nor will I hear, Mama, I need helppppp, in the morning.

I’ll let you spend the afternoon breaking those moments down into information, content, and data but, for now, the point is that The Story offers a structure that’ll guide design moves for a holistic experience. Maybe I’ll also turn the rug so it covers more floor area, maybe I’ll put corner padding on the edges of the dresser to avoid accidents, etc. 

The Story is the guiding structure. No structure = no story. Test it out yourself. Shuffle the moments in the story above and see if you still have a story. 

Now, let’s scale up.

The Place 

Architecture is the space between information – the space between intention and perception. It is the form that gives way to intention and perception. It encapsulates moments and stories. It’s a progressional overlay of information, content, and data that indicates/implies/captures/eludes to a bigger picture and allows for observed moments to exist. Key word, observed.

Architecture isn’t architecture until it has an observer (be it a visitor, a user, or an inhabitant), someone to read and interpret The Place. But the invitation can only exist after someone has communicated, aka revealed their intention. Revealing invites the observer. Without the reveal, there is no longer any potential for The Moments to come to life.

Let’s scale up in the next post.

‘The Moment’ in a Designer’s Mind

In the previous article, I mentioned, “As designers, we’ve all learned to pay attention, identify the grid, break the grid, and make navigating the new grid intuitive.” So, what is it exactly that we’re doing in this generic “pay attention” step? We’re looking for potential. The potential to inspire curiosity, raise awareness, spark pleasure, bring clarity in the lives of the people around us and the list goes on. 

If you went to architecture school, you may remember when you were told to design moments? We were told to be sensitive to the moment-by-moment experience of our inhabitants while walking through our space. The moment someone on the ground floor locked eyes with a passerby on the mezzanine. The moment they exited from the low-ceiling corridor into the vast high-ceiling space. The moment they looked up or down, or walked this way or that way, or brushed along this person or that thing. Such tiny little considerations had the potential to make them present in their surroundings, aware of their scale, pleased by the view, etc.

The same principle applies across all design ventures, whether graphic design, product design, instructional design, etc. Across different design industries, we use stories to organize moments within the lives of our users/inhabitants/visitors where they interact with our Thing. We create avatars/personas/profiles that act as embodiments of that story to help us focus and refocus our intention when designing.

But, the moment is so much broader than its relation to designers. It’s the thing we, as laypeople, often take for granted when experiencing it but are intentional when making it that way. This can include rearranging home furniture to avoid kids getting hurt, putting clothes back in the right spot that had fallen from a rack at the store, walking the shopping cart back to its designated spot in the grocery’s parking lot, and so much more. 

So, in the endless sea of possibilities, designers pay attention and choose well the moments that will make an individual at ease and pleasantly experience their environment or thing.

Anatomy of The Moment

The Moment /n./: a single potential (from the endless possibilities of “thing” arrangements) in a designer’s mind, occurring in time and space that influences their user’s state of being and leads them into the next potential seamlessly. 

Having realized that all I’ve been doing for 15 years was designing moments, regardless of what I called myself, I wondered, “What are the common pieces (underneath all the terminology and attached meanings) that give birth to The Moment?” Location, time, things, intention, and people seem to sum it up. 

In her book, How To Make Sense of Any Mess, Abby Covert helped me tidy up what I thought was the crux of The Moment with a vocabulary that aligns all of my thought process. She distinguishes between data, content, and information. Data is facts (like location and time), content is things (like…things), and information she says, is “whatever is conveyed or represented by a particular arrangement or sequence of things” (like intention and perception). 

So, why do I say this, my dear colleague?

It’s to say that at the core of architecture training is this very thing. By way of feasibility studies to figure out the data, by programming to narrow down the content, by intentionally choosing moments and expressing them through walls and floors, trained architects have come face to face the basics of User Experience design. 

Think of UX as an abstraction of what you already know. You switch out the kind of data, content, and information, and the outcome looks different. It may look like an item on a store shelf, maybe it looks like a Google Doc, or it could be food on someone’s plate. We’re all starting on The Moment.

Join in the next post if you’re ready to scale up.

Your Suuuper Basic Guide to Transition from Architecture to UX (and elsewhere)

I assumed the transition into Information Architecture (IA) would be effortless being that I’ve been doing Information Design for a while now AND my background is in Architecture (buildings). A natural progression for my career, I thought. 

After joining The Sensemaker’s Club, I realized how different IA is from Information Design and regular ole Architecture. I learned that IA falls within the realm of User Experience (UX) and that I needed a complete shift in vocabulary to understand its concepts. 

Initially, I took comfort in the term “user experience” because I’m all about the “human experience” … Isn’t the User just another word for Human? No (I learned weeks later, although some may argue it should be). The user is someone who uses a product – AHA, this is a product design field. I know you have a snarky look on your face if you come from UX. Whelp! This is the roundabout way that I’ve frequently found myself on the self-taught journey. You don’t just jump into buying a course or taking part in a workshop. You get to some “basic” understanding on your own first, which is usually a process of deconstructing before it’s a construction process. Being self-taught usually means that you're following your curiosities instinctually. The words “information” and “architecture” resonate deeply with me and so, I followed the instinct.

Basic Questions

Confident-me asked, Isn’t shelter the first and most essential product that we develop as a species? So, doesn’t that make building-architects the OG UX designers? (I see you, you snarky UXer.) 

I kept questioning my knowledge of “the basics.” Shouldn’t I know some things about UX? I mean, I am a trained architect. Do I know anything about IA? Was I sleeping in college? My insecurities were tapered when I revisited my 2009 Construction Principles book that’s been collecting dust waiting to be donated to the library. And, phew, my memory was easily refreshed on the basics. Somewhat relieved after translating some of the concepts in my book to UX terms, still, it wasn’t enough to get me to understand what the user experience is.

Did I really think I’d gloss over the IA processes and become a natural? Yes. Yes, I did. Turns out UX delves deep into the behavioral patterns of humans and the psychology of choice. And turns out, taking architecture into the digital space is COMPLICATED.

Nonetheless, I love where I am. I love having followed my passion all the way to this messy place. The hills I’m climbing are necessary to help me actualize optimal pleasure in my work life. 

I wondered how many of my colleagues who thought that architecture school would turn them into building-designers faced the stark reality that that’s not happening for them. How many of them realized that their values lay in the human or user experience? 

I think I speak for a lot of us when I say a piece of our hearts and minds lives on a different timeline where we went on to design buildings. But, we are here and now and have to let go.

Basic Questions 2: The Ego’s Query & Saying Goodbye

Usually, I’m more interested in the truth of who I am and where my desire to express burns rather than where I “ought” to be given my history/circumstances. But, there was a daunting question that found itself tangled in my training and some adolescent daydreams. 

A hard admittance, but: Can I still call myself an architect? 

It seems to have been written between the lines of our Architecture curriculum, that the ultimate goal was to be an icon or at the very least, noteworthy. The next Frank Lloyd Wright? Zaha Hadid? This ego’s quarry took me lots of self-work and identity-shedding.

And, drumroll – Yes. The answer is yes. You can call yourself whatever you want outside the world of licensure and stamping. Although, I would try to let go if it’s coming from a place of glamor. Outside of our built environment, architects are behind the scenes. Like, ghostly behind the scenes. (Maybe that’s why we didn’t learn about them. Do they even exist?)

If you bravely admit and actually get over this hump, know that those who are good at architecting aren’t always called Architects. Sometimes they’re called managers, writers, teachers, marketers, and the list goes on. The difference is in the parameters that they’re working within (you may call this the context or the grid). Sometimes these parameters are made out of iron in the ground, sometimes they’re digital rulers on a screen, sometimes they’re social beliefs and habits. The architect is paving the way for others to navigate the issues they are facing intuitively.

Basic Questions 3: Me Different, how?

The value that underlies both Architecture and UX, and any design venture, is the human experience. That’s what design is – the manifestation of our desire to solve a problem for another. A local expression of service. It just so happens that building-architects refer to that human as an inhabitant and not a “user.” Nonetheless, after saying goodbye comes some grief and you might find yourself moving into the next phase of your ego’s quarry like I did:

Ok, so maybe I’m not an Architect – with a capital A – but the architect in me wants to express herself. How does my training differentiate me from other designers?

As designers, we’ve all learned to pay attention, identify the grid, break the grid, and make navigating the new grid intuitive. Sounds pretty holistic, so what’s the architect’s role? Scale. (Full-fledged response in the next article.)

An architect creates a place for people to gather in. Be it a building, an organization, an event, a website, an understanding, etc. That architect is only as good as her attentiveness to the context at large.