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A Systems Thinking View of Scaling TAP’s 2025 Onboarding


This year, TAP crossed 3× student onboarding compared to last year — and is still counting!

While this outcome was the result of sustained effort across multiple teams, from outreach to operations, what made this cycle fundamentally different was how we designed for onboarding.

As the Design Head at TAP, we made a conscious shift:

From designing steps → to designing behaviours from optimising flows → to activating systems

This piece breaks down how Behaviour Design and Systems Thinking shaped TAP’s 2025 onboarding — and what designers building in the social impact space can learn from it.


First, a Reality Check: Onboarding in Social Impact Is Never Linear

On paper, onboarding looks simple. In reality, especially in the social sector, onboarding is a multi-layered ecosystem involving:


  • Government education officers

  • District, block, and zone officials

  • School heads (HMs)

  • Nodal teachers

  • Classroom teachers

  • Students

  • Parents

  • Infrastructure constraints

  • Human motivation (or lack of it)


You’re not onboarding users. You’re onboarding a system. And systems don’t move because of one good pitch deck or one polished flow. They move when the right behaviours are activated at the right touchpoints.



Understanding TAP’s Onboarding Ecosystem

Traditionally, TAP’s onboarding follows this journey:


TAP <> Government

  1. The Program Team approaches government education officials to seek support and approval.

  2. TAP’s mission and past-year impact are shared to gain patronage.

  3. Once officials are aligned, schools within their wards, zones, or districts are encouraged to participate.


TAP <> Schools

  1. To manage scale with a lean team, nodal teachers are identified to create a hierarchy within schools.

  2. School Heads (HMs) are approached through these nodal teachers.

  3. Once schools are on board, teacher and student data is shared.


TAP <> Teachers <> Students

  1. One of the ways TAP delivers learning is via an afterschool model, powered by an AI enabled WhatsApp-based bot.

  2. Teachers act as enablers — answering queries, reminding students, supporting participation.

  3. Teachers then induct students, explaining how to register and use TAP on their parents’ phones.

  4. Student registrations begin.


That’s a lot of moving parts.And like most complex systems, friction was not in one place — it was everywhere.


Applying Systems Thinking: Mapping Before Fixing

Instead of jumping straight into “how do we increase registrations?”, the design team paused.

We asked:


  • Who are all the stakeholders involved?

  • What motivates each of them?

  • What blocks them?

  • Where does effort feel high?

  • Where does ownership feel unclear?

  • Where does momentum drop?


We mapped the entire onboarding journey as a systems map:


  • Stakeholders (government officers, HMs, nodal teachers, teachers, students)

  • Front-end touchpoints (meetings, inductions, WhatsApp flows)

  • Back-end activities (data sharing, tracking, follow-ups)

  • Artefacts used (presentations, playbooks, dashboards, messages)

  • Emotional states (confidence, hesitation, fatigue, urgency)


Preview of System Thinking applied while working with the program team at TAP


We worked closely with the Program Team, not just as stakeholders but as co-designers, to understand where the process felt heavy, repetitive, or unclear on the ground.


This helped us see something important:

Each stakeholder was behaving rationally — within their own constraints. The problem wasn’t intent. The problem was misaligned incentives and high cognitive load.


Designing for Behaviour, Not Just Flow

Based on this systems understanding, we created a three-pronged behaviour design strategy, each tailored to a key stakeholder group:


TAP's Onboarding strategy designed keeping behaviour in mind


Government: Designing for Visibility, Trust & Authority

For government stakeholders, motivation was clear:They wanted to see impact, reach, and proof. But the system lacked:


  • real-time visibility

  • consolidated data

  • an easy way to track progress


So we designed data monitoring artefacts, not as reporting tools, but as behaviour enablers.


What we built:

  • Daily dashboards showing registrations by district, block, and zone

  • Weekly summaries highlighting trends and growth

  • Monthly in-person reviews focused on insights, not raw numbers


These artefacts:


  • reduced effort (no manual follow-ups)

  • increased clarity (one source of truth)

  • reinforced authority (officials could nudge schools confidently)


The response was overwhelmingly positive — many officials shared that this level of transparency and clarity was new for them. When the government becomes a partner, not just a gatekeeper, scale follows.


Schools: Designing for Clarity, Recognition & Motivation

For School Heads, Nodal Teachers, and Teachers, the blockers were different:

  • overwhelming workload

  • unclear instructions

  • invisible effort

  • no recognition


Our design interventions focused on:

  • Clear playbooks explaining what to do, when, and how

  • Short videos in their own language by people they know (the Program Team Leads) replacing long documents

  • Gamified nudges and recognition for schools with higher registrations

  • Acknowledging teachers as enablers, not just intermediaries




The goal wasn’t to push harder — It was to reduce friction and increase perceived value.When teachers felt supported and recognised, registrations stopped feeling like “extra work” and started feeling purposeful.


Students: Designing for Ease, Relatability & Confidence

For students, the challenge was to design around tech and environmental constraints.

  • shared devices

  • limited digital confidence

  • dependency on parents’ phones

  • fear of “doing something wrong”


Here, design focused on:

  • simplifying the WhatsApp registration flow

  • reducing steps

  • using familiar language and graphical story telling approach

  • showcasing testimonials from students like them


Simplified Onboarding showcased to a student through graphical storytelling


Testimonials and showcases from student like them



Seeing peers talk about how TAP helped them build confidence and prepare for the future made participation feel achievable — not intimidating.


What Changed This Year

This was the first onboarding cycle where every intervention was designed with the broader system in mind. We did see the results,


  • 3× registrations compared to last year

  • Faster momentum across districts

  • Stronger government partnership

  • Reduced pressure on program teams

  • More consistent school participation


This success belongs to all teams involved. But it also demonstrates something important: System-level thinking doesn’t just improve design, it unlocks scale.


What’s Next

This onboarding phase has given us the confidence to apply the same behaviour + systems lens to learning outcomes next.


We’re currently running a series of behaviour design experiments — and I’m excited to share what we learn as this series continues.


If you’re a designer working in social impact, education, or public systems: Design the system before the screen. Design behaviours before features.


That’s where real impact begins.

 
 
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