Service Desk: What We Do
Here's how we can help. It really depends on where you are in your journey:
If you are curious to learn more about service design in media:
Meet us at conference service desks
We set up at industry conferences for quick, in-person consultations. Bring a specific challenge you're wrestling with. In 30-60 minutes, we'll help you reframe it and identify a possible next step. No prep required, no commitment needed.
Recent conferences: Rosenfeld Media Advancing Service Design (November 2025), News Product Alliance Summit (October, 2025), Lenfest News Philanthropy Summit (May 2025)
Read some of our resources
Read our published work to understand more about service design in media:
- Start with service: A practical reset for media impact (Lenfest Institute)
- Service-oriented journalism: Moving from Idealism to Utility (Lenfest Institute)
- Our full methods catalog
If you have a specific challenge you want to work on:
Book an individual consulting session
Through support from partners, we offer one-on-one sessions to help you work through a specific challenge. Book a session when you're facing questions like:
- Is anyone actually using what we create?
- What problems are we really solving?
- How do we know if we're making a difference?
- What would make our work more useful?
In these sessions, we help you identify the real information needs at play, work through a first principles approach, and leave with concrete next steps for experimentation. After these sessions, some teams can independently work on their challenge with redirection, some check back in after implementing to see if they're on track, and others stay in closer contact.
If you want to make this how your team thinks/works:
Attend or design workshops and training with us
For teams ready to make service-oriented work a sustained practice. We design custom workshops based on your team's specific needs and context.
Recent workshop themes:
- How to think about journalism as service
- Jobs-to-be-done frameworks for information services
- Designing research to answer your audience questions
- Measuring community outcomes aka what actually matters
These are hands-on, interactive sessions where you and your team works through real challenges you're facing, not hypothetical examples.
You just read about what we do at The Service Desk.
- Read more about what The Service Desk is.
- Read more on how we work.
Questions? Suggestions? Ideas?