Amplify Empathy: We Succeed Because We Care
What is Amplify Empathy?
Amplify Empathy represents a hope, a cause, and a heartfelt desire that companies will work towards developing a deeper understanding of their customers’ needs, and that they will use this knowledge to serve those needs better. More specifically, Temkin Group created the Amplify Empathy movement to encourage individuals to help build stronger empathy for their customers within their organizations.
As part of our commitment to Amplify Empathy, Temkin Group will continue to research and write on the topic of organizational empathy. As a primer, check out these posts:
- Building Organizational Empathy: Perceive-Reflect-Adjust, shows how to embed empathy across CX competencies.
- People-Centric Experience Design is a free eBook that includes the principle, Guide with Empathy.
- Join Me in Making 2014 the Year of Empathy includes an amazing video from the Cleveland Clinic.
- Three Steps For Happiness to Fuel Organizational Empathy connects two inter-related topics.
- Five Questions That Drive Customer Journey Thinking propels the value of customer journey maps across an organization.
Join the Amplify Empathy Movement
We hope that individuals will pledge to Amplify Empathy within their organizations and will share their successes with others.
To take the pledge, simply write, “I pledge to Amplify Empathy,” in the comment box below, and proudly display this badge wherever you like.
We hope that you will also share descriptions of your Amplify Empathy efforts within your organization in the comments below. Use the hashtag #AmplifyEmpathy to get the message out on Twitter.
The $2,500 Amplify Empathy Challenge
To encourage people to share their best practices, Temkin Group choose five people who we believe submitted the best ideas for Amplifying Empathy.
Temkin Group selected winners of the Amplify Empathy Challenge based on its evaluation of the ideas submitted on the Website. The criteria that it will use include the innovativeness of the idea, the success that it has achieved, and its ability to be replicated by other organizations.
Congratulations to the winners (see blog post) who each won an Amazon.com $500 gift certificate:
- Aaron Cooper, Customer Experience Architect, Prime Therapeutics
- Diane Stover Hopkins, Innovation Strategy Executive, Beacon Health System
- Kristi Roe, Director-The Patient Experience, Carolinas Healthcare System
- Lisa Henken-Ramirez, Vice President, Customer Experience, NetSpend, a TSYS Company
- A Lee Massaro
Continue to submit your ideas below and tweet them at #AmplifyEmpathy
The bottom line: Together, we can Amplify Empathy!
Customer Experience Matters® 
Hi Everyone: Post your ideas about how you’ve amplified empathy within your organization and you may be one of the winners in Temkin Group’s $2,500 Amplify Empathy Challenge. Also, join me in making this pledge: I pledge to amplify empathy!
I pledge to amplify empathy! Looking forward to seeing everyone’s ideas.
This one’s certainly not prize-worthy but hopefully we are able to submit several ideas, both simple and more significant. One way in the past I have effectively amplified empathy is to join various internal team meetings with printouts of actual customer verbatims — good and bad — and have each team member read one outloud. There is something about vocalizing the customer comment (as the reader) or hearing it outloud (for the rest in the room) that resonates so much more strongly than skimming it in an email or having someone else summarize it to you. /Jen
I pledge to Amplify Empathy
I pledge to Amplify Empathy and I can’t wait to see how you will amplify empathy at your company!
Excellent! Thank you, I love the idea..
Amplified Empathy:
I integrated empathy mapping into cross-functional design workshops, focused on generating customer-centered ideas to inform redesign of experiences within digital channels.
These workshops were hosted in a main corporate office, and brought directly to stakeholders via an on-site session at one of our call center locations. This was an excellent way to build empathy across the business, by bringing the opportunity directly to key team members.
Each team in a design workshop was composed of 4-5 people – a mix of developers, system analysts, business leads, customer experience professionals, call center agents and other team members. Each team was given two scenarios, based on one of our five personas. The scenarios provided a description of the persona, their context, needs, specific tasks and “how might we” statements to stimulate thinking. The workshops were structured as a series of rapid sketching sessions, kicked off by empathy mapping before sketching began for each persona’s scenario.
During empathy mapping, each team member contributed real, recent customer experiences. Call center agents offered particularly rich descriptions of customer thoughts, feelings, statements and actions (Think, Say, Feel, Do) to feed the conversations. Directly after empathy mapping, teams individually and collaboratively sketched, then reviewed and consolidated concepts, then voted on ideas. I tied the idea voting directly to customer experience metrics (eg. ease of doing business – see Forrester), plus a colored dot for “breakthrough idea, if…” to emphasize ideas that had innovative characteristics. By weaving key performance indicators into voting, very early in the design process, team members had another way to evaluate the efficacy of ideas.
Results:
While I have experience planning and participating in design thinking workshops which are very successful in generating ideas, I had never seen empathy mapping directly woven into a workshop process like this.
Positioning empathy mapping and persona discussion directly in front of each scenario design challenge enabled participants to step into our customer’s shoes – to guide sketching and development of ideas. This created an environment that was truly customer-centered.
As I facilitated the workshops I heard team members saying, “Sure, but how would that help {Persona Name Here}?”, or, “I understand that’s a technology constraint, but let’s explore this more, because it could really help {Persona Name Here}.” Everyone, from project managers and system analysts to business leads and designers, was focused on our customer’s needs.
The strengthened empathy not only informed ideation during each workshop, but it persisted after the workshops and into daily working relationships and conversations. Since I included people from various teams in the workshop, that empathy was carried throughout the business.
The ideas elicited from these empathy-filled workshops led to designs that have increased efficiency of our customers (as shown in usability testing) and built a palpable connection between our teams and the voices of our customers.
Aaron: Please send me your contact information. I can be reached at bruce@temkingroup.com
I pledge to Amplify Empathy.
I pledge to Amplify Empathy
I pledge to Amplify Empathy at every level of our organization! Thank you Temkin Group for providing the tools and resources that will help us to accomplish this.
I pledge to Amplify Empathy. Here is a recent example of how Panera Bread exemplified empathy. http://linkd.in/1jqf14i
“I pledge to Amplify Empathy”. One of our companies serves businesses in VOC research projects and the evaluation of performance at the interface with the customer.
Even if we were always praised for the quality of our service, there was always a “missing link”, an un-accomplished “warmth” level in the relationship with our customers.
Until one day we had the idea to invite some of their representatives to come and work together with us, in our office, with our methodologies, for their own project. So they can understand what we do, how we prepare for them and act for them. So that we understand how they see our methodology and how fit they find it for what they really need. So that we get inspired by their new angle of view and they get inspired by experiencing the opportunities to achieve their goals that come with our work. This enables us to work like a real team together. We have no more secrets and we have a human face, beyond meeting-rooms and contracts and executive summaries and emails. For one day, we share work, breaks, coffee, thoughts and smiles.
Not all customers, when we invite them, take this step right away. But those who do it, they love to be with us for a long time after that, as they can test our human warmth and our dedication to them, our openness and genuine interest in them and their objectives. And we are more motivated to deliver for them.
Thank you Bruce Temkin Group for this great initiative!
I pledge to amplify empathy
I pledge to amplify empathy.
In product design, empathy is encompassed in understanding the customer’s needs, on multiple levels, then creating a product which addresses those needs, as well as the needs of your company. As an aid to ensure I was being empathetic on all levels of customer needs, i.e. functional, job or activity, and life needs, I created an experience design model that combines this hierarchy of needs with the Kano model’s feature classifications. Useful for any business that would like to audit their total customer experience and identify missing components in product strategy. The approach has helped Allegiance invent break-through products in the Voice of Customer analytics space. I’ve written about the model here http://www.allegiance.com/blog/designing-a-great-customer-experience-strategy/4143 and here https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140415123210-2648883-the-total-customer-experience
I pledge to amplify empathy #AmplfyEmpathy #damovouk
A very effective approach I’ve tried is what I call EMPATHY BOARD Workshops. I gather front line staff and we share some of the not so positive feedback we’ve received from customers/patients. We summarize how the bad experiences illustrate that some staff have lost site of who exactly they are serving. I then develop sample patient personas of someone who’s a patient and what they may be hoping/fearing/expecting at the hospital. In small groups they work with these scenarios and ideate around ways they could DELIGHT this person in this situation. The group shares their ideas and I facilitate discussions around how do we exceed their expectations first and then exceed the imagination as our ultimate goal. The ideas are tested and share after the workshops to see which can be authentically delivered. Often the empathy scenarios bring staff to tears and once I have connected their emotion(heart) to their intelligence (brain), i have a direct path to behavior change and commitment. After the workshops the Empathy patient scenarios with photos and quotes are formatted into a poster and placed in back stage staff areas to serve as constant reminders of the people in their care and all they may be dealing with. The heading of the posters is WHO WILL YOU DELIGHT TODAY?
Management and frontline staff have expressed enthusiastic appreciation for the eye-opening approach and “Would you recommend scores, for areas continue to go up in areas that stick to this program. The bottom-line is that sometimes we must re-introduce our staff to the customer’s they’re serving in a more personal way since day to day business sometimes leads all of us to forget.
We amplify empathy every day!
Let me count just a few of the ways in 2014:
1. We ran a contest on how employees created customers for life, and then made a moving ten minute video featuring these wonderful employees telling their stories and mixed them with the customers who were wowed by beautiful demonstrations of empathy. The video was shown at various leadership meetings, shared with employees and has become part of new employee orientation.
2. We created a series of playful two minute training modules that are spread region wide every two weeks. These videos highlight how to use empathy in all types of different situations with customers; these are interspersed with modules encouraging self-care which demonstrate empathy for our employees! This combination has proven to really engage staff members!
3. We do live trainings with lots of role playing and coaching – we invented the “empathy speed round” where each participant hears a statement and has to respond first with empathy before they go on to apologize for or fix the situation. A lively way to practice and bring empathy to top of mind.
4. We work with leaders to develop empathy for their people first, so that they can be better coaches for bringing empathy out of their employees.
And that’s just on our little Education team – lots of other work happening with our complaint resolution folks, customer insight groups, and others. Most importantly, we strive to walk the empathy walk every day.
A. Lee Massaro: Please send me your contact information. I can be reached at bruce@temkingroup.com
I pledge to amplify empathy!
At my agency, I conducted a 21-Day Know Yourself Better Challenge (based on Gretchen Rubin’s Happier at Home book) in which employee received daily emails with activities, questions and actions to try to get to know themselves better. After the 21 days, we had a lunch debrief where people shared what helped them best and was the most enlightening experience for them.
In conjunction with the challenge, employees were given the opportunity to take the Gallup Strengthsfinder assessment. Individuals and/or teams could take the assessment and then receive a 30 minute coaching on their top 5 strengths and how they can apply them and leverage them in the workplace. Managers were give team reports of where their strengths fell on the strengths matrix. It was a great team building exercise and a way to honor and respect our differences and to realize that we all are necessary to contribute to the team and agency’s success.
We also had a communication piece going on boards throughout our agency talking about the positive effects of Knowing, Growing and Showing your strengths. We interviewed employees who volunteered to share how one of their strengths helps them add value to their team and workplace. Employees who took the strength assessment displayed their top 5 strengths outside of their cubes. 12 employees had EMPATHY in their top 5!
Understanding ourselves and learning about and acknowledging each other’s strengths amplified empathy in our workplace. By putting ourselves in each other’s shoes, we could value and recognize each other’s differences and how we need all kinds of strengths in the workplace to be more collaborative, creative and productive as an agency.
PS: If I win the gift card, I’m going to purchase a Keurig and M&M dispenser through Amazon.com for my team. We can empathize with each other over coffee and chocolate whenever we want!!
I pledge to amplify empathy.
We’re on a mission to rid the world of boring training, and in our latest offering for learning professionals, the MOOC on Corporate MOOCs, we showed why and how to put the *learner* in the center of the universe, not the system, or the content, or the experts.
If you’d like to check it out, email mocm@intrepidlearning.com and we’ll send you an ID and password.
Also, I made the badge my Facebook profile photo. This is a banner I want to carry.
We at Carolinas Healthcare System are amplifying empathy! I work in the Patient Experience department, and empathy is the foundation of patient centered care. We are the 2nd largest not-for profit healthcare organization in the country: 900 care locations across North Carolina and South Carolina with over one million patient encounters annually. So when we started our “empathy journey” it felt like a daunting charge! How to engage all of our teammates, from environmental services, to physicians, to billing, to administration in an empathy movement.
First, a powerful video was made by our learning and development specialist Debi Dollar. It was to the song “Man in the Mirror” by Michael Jackson. The video exemplified how we need to see ourselves in the eyes of the patient, and that every interaction, even as small as giving someone directions, needed to be empathic. Patients are scared, anxious, and live in a world of uncertainty. We need to be cognizant of their reality, and in turn respond to them in a nurturing and understanding way. The video is remarkable and is a great demonstration of what empathy is, and how we can operationalize it throughout out system. It has been a powerful tool in engaging our teammates.
Next we set out to build an empathy experience. Some might think of it as a class, but it is much more than that. A four hour experience was created that takes participants through a journey on empathy. From self reflection, to prejudices and biases we might have, and finally to staying connected to purpose, this experience serves as our foundational class for all new teammates to attend to learn about our culture, and for existing teammates to participate in. The class has many powerful learning activities, but one of the most impactful is the discussion of a picture of a homeless man. We show the photo and ask for the feelings it arouses in our participants. Then we go on to tell his story, which is one of tragedy and loss, and it shows how we can never truly know what a person has endured and therefore need to have compassion in all of our encounters…even when someone might not seem open to it.
The class is called A is for Empathy. The title reflects our Acknowledgement of Empathy…and that we need to acknowledge our patients AND teammates in an empathic way, every encounter, every person, every time.
Thanks to everyone who has pledged to Amplify Empathy! Together we can make a difference!!!
NetSpend is a prepaid debit card provider, so our customers a hard-working Americans with little extra time for complicated processes or long waits. We amplify empathy by walking in our customers footsteps.
To make sure our entire company understands the realities our customers face, we ask all of our employees from our CEO to our Customer Service Agents to spend a day walking in the footsteps of our customers. We divide the company into cross-functional teams of ten so that our employees have to work with people in other departments that they don’t know.
We give each team a check for $400, bus passes and a list of challenges that represent the challenges our customers most often face. The teams take public transportation to cash the check and buy a NetSpend prepaid debit card. Then the teams use the card to pay it forward, buying groceries for a family, paying bills for someone, filling up gas tanks. They meet a customers, see our processes like account opening, activation and card usage from our customer’s perspective and get to know each other.
At the end of the event, the teams are exhausted from running all over town, fulfilled from giving to people and much more understanding of our customers and the challenges they face. The teams always come back with great ideas for improvements to our customer experience. We call it Community Connect because it allows our employees to connect to our community of customers.
http://www.tsys.com/About/HeartofTSYS/community-connect-netspend.cfm
I pledge to amplify empathy.
Two good tools I recommend in order to enhance empathy within organizations – developing a deeper understanding of customer needs, and using this knowledge to serve those needs better:
1. retrospect learning – employees are presented with true stories of customers who recieved bad service and had a negative experience, which in first glance was completely due to the customer’s own fault (not reading instructions, being impatient, refusing to listen, etc.). Employees are then encouraged to think together (hypothize) what reasons may have caused the customer to act the way he/she did – for example, this customer may be very uptight since she had a car accident a day ago (a fact the service person doesn’t know, but if he did, it may have helped him be more patient and understanding while giving service). The drill is intended to help employees see beyond the current service ‘situation’ and try to act within a broader context of giving better service within unknowen circumstances of the customer’s background.
2. Another “theoretical” drill is to present the employees with a real life description of customers who had a bad service experience which (again) the employees would tend to blame the customer himself for – and them ask the employees to imagine this customer is not an a “john smith” but rather a close family member of theirs – a father, a wife, a son or a brother. This can help employees see how they should treat each customer with care as if he is their family… while going “the extra empathy mile” to understand their unique needes, and serve them better.
We created an organisation, the Center for Building a Culture of Empathy, to raise the level of empathy in the world. We’ve create a cornucopia of resources for fostering empathy. Including, hundreds of interviews with world experts on empathy, a magazine, empathy practice processes and group, etc. http://cultureofempathy.com/
While there are many projects we do, one way we Amplify Empathy is by creating empathy teams to use Human Centered Design to raise the level of empathy in organizations. the teams can be seen here.
https://sites.google.com/site/empathyteams/
We’ve been working at the Oakland CA HUB and setting up an empathic listening space where people can be heard and seen for issues, feelings and needs that are important to the.
EdwinRutsch@gmail.com
I pledge to Amplify Empathy!
Empathy is a crucial component to ensure customer satisfaction and happiness as both an individual and working in an organization. At Allegiance our head of customer success realized a disconnect in making sure our customers had the best resources available to them at all times. While the account managers had established relationships and great rapport, they were lacking in the technical expertise needed to help resolve issues quickly and with expertise.
This necessitated a change in our company structure to put technical experts in direct connection with the customer, rather than through the previous path of going through their account manager, who then connected them with the right team members, developers, etc. Our account managers are now highly-trained individuals who are technical experts and in direct line of the customer, removing an unnecessary layer in the organization.
By making this adjustment it will ensure our customers have timely access the help they need and a direct path to success. This provides a much more efficient relationship through the entire life cycle. As a result of this change our customer satisfaction scores are extremely high and our retention rates are phenomenal. As a company we understand that customers are THE reason we are successful and that each of us impact the customer relationship.
I pledge to Amplify Empathy at every level of our organization!
I guess it goes without saying that I love what I do. I feel lucky to have a great partner and a wonderful team and we are all committed to change the world. Well, maybe not the whole world just yet, but we are certainly aiming to make a big difference. For our young organization, this difference is customer service and customer support.
There are many types of issues handled by customer service, but predominantly they can be classified into two groups – simple issues or inquiries and complex problems.
Simple issues are simple for a reason. They can be handled within a single interaction or a non-critical issue reporting that can be resolved by the organization without additional customer input. Since most organizations find simple problems to be frequent and reoccurring, it makes sense to address them with automated channels – with mobile capable knowledge-based systems, social media, improved website forms, text messages, and chat systems. These solutions successfully reduce a large number of calls placed to the call centers. Yet, these same channels generally are less effective in resolving complex issues, especially when a complex issue is addressed with a wrong channel or when the problem truly is a complex issue posing as a simple symptom.
It is not surprising to know that most complex issues are handled over the phone. It takes a lot more time to explain the problem in detail, so that the customer service agent can understand it, analyze it, and work on providing the resolution. For certain communications, like resolving erroneous billing chargers, reporting wrong shipped items, or filling out complicated financial applications, there is no substitute to a verbal in-depth conversation. However, for all other complex customer service issues, which generally fall in the realm of support, is there anything that can be done to help shorten the support time without compromising customer satisfaction?
Absolutely! Technology is yet again making the headway in helping customer service support operations. The biggest impediment in electronics support, tech support, any other question for any device that requires installation, operation, or diagnostics is the verbal communication. End consumers are attempting to explain what they are seeing and the problem they are experiencing. Meanwhile, the agent is attempting to decipher the message to understand the problem. The more complex the problem, the more time it takes to explain it in order to resolve it. If neither the customer nor the agent can come to the consensus, the issue is escalated requiring either shipment of a replacement or scheduling an on site visit.
What if we could apply visual streaming to the same scenario and allow the customer to share what he is seeing with the customer service agent real-time? How helpful would that be? Most would certainly recognize that complex issue resolution can be greatly improved with this technology. With larger number of end consumers already being attached at the hip to their mobile phones and tablets, it makes it very easy to equip the customers with the means to enhance verbal communications with real-time visual context. For organizations that already have mobile apps freely available for their customers, this feature would do wonders if it is added in the existing mobile app.
Now, lets take a look at the benefits of this solution using some very basic customer service problems. Customers want the issues to be resolved quickly. They want the issues to be resolved on a first call and they want to be understood without having to repeat their concerns multiple times to multiple parties. Organizations, in the meantime, are looking for efficient response at the best quality of customer service possible, which would preserve a high level of customer satisfaction. With visual data, the pains and goals of both sides are addressed. Having seen the problem first hand, the agent can understand it sooner and can determine if the issue requires an onsite visit or can actually be handled remotely. The customer, at the same time, receives high quality service with immediate feedback and necessary guidance.
There are many scenarios where this feature would be greatly useful. Printer or copier error, support of mobile device applications or software hosted in secure data centers where screen sharing is not available, and even furniture assembly. Many scenarios can benefit from a delivery of visual communication to existing phone interaction. Best of all, this is only the beginning. We are entering the age of the wearable devices that will bring even more innovations in improving support of complex customer service issues.
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I would like to share a little insight into our small bite of early recognition. While it was a small success, it really recognized the difference we are making. A true, inspiring moment that makes all the hard work and relentless efforts worth it.
My partner and I were visiting an early client’s office and just conducted the training. The training for this public adjustment company was a lot of fun and went extremely well. We went through a presentation, explained our solutions, and role played with our brave early adopters to be customer service agents and the customers. Committed to our client’s success, we did not leave after the training. Instead, we stayed for the duration of the day to help with any questions that may occur once our solutions are employed.
About 3 hours went by uneventfully. It was a nice sunny day, when not too many calls are made for help with claims. We were ready to pack, when the intercom in the conference room that became my temporary office went off.
“We have our first customer using Livegenic to show us the claim remotely”, said the voice on the intercom. We dropped everything and went to find the adjuster who took the call. Few flights of stairs and we were in adjuster’s office, looking at his desk and two side by side monitors. On one monitor, there was a claims management system, while on the other was our portal with a real-time streaming video feed from the customer’s mobile phone.
It was surreal. Adjuster’s speakerphone was on and I could hear the conversation with the client. The client was instructed to show the size and scope of the damage. In this case, there was water in the basement, a wet carpet, lots of wet personal items, and even damaged, water saturated doors that either were unable to be closed or were stuck shut.
Walking the client through demonstration of the damage, the adjuster inspected the windows, walls, and even exterior water runoff spouts, until finally recognizing a sump pump behind one of the basement doors. The prior night, heavy thunderstorms pounded the area with severe flood warnings, and when the heavy rain persistently continued, the sump pump was unable to hold the volume of water it had to pump into the drain.
“This is great”, said an adjuster. “Typically it would have been a next day inspection to figure out the problem and after cleanup, we might not have been able to offer help. Now, this way, the call was reduced to simply determining the client’s coverage.” If the coverage covered a sump pump endorsement, the claim can be completely handled remotely and the water damage cleanup crew can be called to clean the area to avoid further damage and mold. Most importantly, with insurance coverage, the home owner would not have to break his back attempting to clean things up himself, as the cleanup crew work would be completely covered and paid for by insurance.
I stood there watching this happen in owe. The vision my partner and I had, and the hard work that went into implementing the technology has just made one happy client and one satisfied customer. In a life of entrepreneur, this is the moment to remember. The first time your ideas, concepts, and hard work truly makes the difference.
I will be happy to connect with leaders in other organizations committed to ensure customer satisfaction and happiness.
Olek Shestakov, oshestak@livegenic.com
I pledge to Amplify Empathy!
At a previous company I worked with our NPS results and feedback indicated there was an awareness gap in our business so we had a customer actually come in and visit us to answer questions and share more about their business. Approx 50 people representing each function attended and all levels within the company. We also filmed this session for some of our colleagues at different sites.
Initially the sales group suggested this was a small customer with little strategic significance, however following the session they realised the extreme growth potential of the account, because our customer let us in on what they were doing, where they were going, what was important to them and most importantly why.
We were able to improve the relationship as a result, it led to some further cross functional sessions with the customer, and our NPS score improved and ultimately so did financial performance in the region.
Eb Banful ebanful81(at)hotmail.com
As a consultant working with a major FMCG our main challenge was balancing the constant push and pull between the past and the future. We needed to put all of our efforts into creating a new future but without forgetting the achievements and heritage that had gone before.
We addressed this by having a group of “Champions” within the business, a diverse group of people from across the organisation who were tasked with helping to focus the organisation mindset externally , they did this by spending more time engaging the consumer and actually carried out visits to end user homes. The champions and members of the business did the home visits to build empathy and ensure a continued focus was always on the end consumer.
Together the group of champions worked through 36 initiatives to engage their
colleagues and provide catalysts for change cutting across hierarchy and functions.
Eb Banful ebanful81(at)hotmail.com
At another company we held customer day- a day where no meetings were allowed except for those directly related to the comments or feedback we received from customers. The entire leadership team also carried out face to face customer visits or spent at least 1 hour listening into calls in the customer service department, we then held cross functional workshops focussed on improvements.
Using NPS verbatims we then looked into the system to understand the internal story of what happened to create that comment/detractor and then we created full fact based stories to help the business empathise with customers and demonstrate how we had dropped the ball.
Resulted in several improvement concepts that made a small impact and a couple of saved customers.
I pledge to amplify empathy in my blog posts and when I evangelize CX.
Congratulations to the five winners of Temkin Group’s $2,500 Amplify Empathy Challenge: Aaron Cooper, Diane Stover Hopkins, Kristi Roe, Lisa Henken-Ramirez, and A Lee Massaro. See blog post about the winners.