Suggestions
Dana Silvers
Human-Centered Design Consultant, Design Strategist, Workshop Facilitator
Professional Background
Dana Silvers is a highly-skilled human-centered design strategist and facilitator who has dedicated over 15 years to addressing complex business challenges through innovative design methods. Throughout her impressive career, Dana has collaborated with a diverse array of organizations, including industry giants like Johnson & Johnson and renowned institutions such as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Her expertise lies at the intersection of design thinking, service design, organizational development, business design, and adult learning. Dana is deeply passionate about sparking creativity, fostering team collaboration, and delivering impactful outcomes that drive organizations forward.
As the Design Strategist, Consultant, and Facilitator at Designing Insights LLC, Dana is dedicated to helping teams harness the power of design thinking to unlock new opportunities and enhance productivity. Her role requires her to not only develop effective design strategies but also to serve as a facilitator ensuring that all team members engage meaningfully throughout the process.
Dana has also made significant contributions to education by serving as an instructor in the Innovation Management Program at UC Berkeley Extension. In this role, she equips aspiring professionals with the knowledge and skills necessary to excel in the fields of innovation and design.
Education and Achievements
Dana's academic background is as impressive as her professional journey. She pursued her Master's Degree in the History of Art at the prestigious University of Chicago, where she cultivated a deep appreciation for visually-driven narratives and critical analysis. Additionally, she earned her Bachelor's Degree in Journalism, with minors in Art History and Italian, from the University of Southern California. This multidisciplinary approach to education not only informs Dana's work but also enhances her ability to communicate effectively across various sectors.
Dana's commitment to language and culture led her to study Italian Language and Literature at the Università per Stranieri di Perugia, an endeavor that further enriches her diverse skill set and cultural understanding.
Notable Roles and Contributions
Dana has a wealth of experience in educational and leadership roles that showcase her talents as an instructor and facilitator. She was a former instructor in the Innovation Management Certificate Program at UC Berkeley Extension, where she inspired students with her knowledge of design thinking.
In her work with the Collaboration Design Institute at MURAL, Dana served as a certified lead instructor and innovation coach. During her time here, she cultivated a rich environment for creative and collaborative learning, enabling participants to explore the potentials of design and innovation.
One of her noteworthy roles was as a faculty member at the Museum Leadership Institute at Claremont Graduate University, where Dana facilitated forward-thinking discussions on the vital role of design in cultural institutions and beyond. Moreover, she made significant strides in the pharmaceutical industry as the SparkWorks Strategy Design Lead for The Janssen Pharmaceutical Companies of Johnson & Johnson, focusing on innovative solutions that meet the needs of healthcare professionals and patients alike.
Dana's passion for design thinking extended to her collaborative efforts with the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford (d.school), where she once served as a design coach. Her experience in this esteemed institution further solidified her reputation as a leader in the field.
As the Head of Web and Digital at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), Dana played an essential role in bridging technology with art, making the museum's digital presence a captivating experience for visitors. This position allowed her to merge her love for art with her expertise in design and technology, innovating new ways for audiences to engage with artwork.
Dana has also held various teaching positions, including Adjunct Faculty for the Digital Technologies for Teaching and Learning Program at the University of San Francisco Graduate School of Education. There, she imparted her knowledge of digital tools and platforms to a new generation of educators. Before these roles, she was the Manager of Website Development at Teacher Universe, Inc. (now part of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), where she contributed to the evolution of educational technologies.
Lastly, Dana's journey began as a Community Producer at the University of California, Berkeley, where she honed her skills in community engagement and resource development.
Skills and Specialties
Dana's extensive skill set is a powerful testament to her abilities as a facilitator and strategist. Her primary specialties include design thinking and service design strategy, which encompass the methodologies that empower organizations to generate innovative solutions tailored to their specific challenges.
Moreover, Dana excels in workshop and meeting design and facilitation, creating environments where collaboration and creativity flourish. Her proficiency in user research and user-centered design methods is pivotal in understanding user needs and translating them into effective design solutions.
In addition to being adept in applied innovation, Dana synthesizes qualitative research data and findings with finesse, transforming insights into tangible strategies that drive organizational change.
Lastly, her dedication to adult learning and instructional design ensures that she guides learners effectively, enhancing their skills and confidence in the innovation space.
Dana Silvers is a dynamic force in the world of design thinking and innovation, with a multifaceted background that bridges the gap between creativity and strategy. With her strong academic foundation, extensive experience across various sectors, and a passion for human-centered design, she continues to make significant contributions to organizations and individuals seeking to harness the power of design to catalyze positive change.
Location
People also viewed
Related People
Clay is a relationship management platform that serves as a personal CRM, helping you organize and deepen both personal and professional relationships. It functions as a beautiful rolodex and CRM available on iPhone, Mac, Windows, and web, built automatically to help manage your network efficiently. Unlike traditional address books, Clay centralizes all your contacts in one place while enriching them with additional context and features to help you stay thoughtful and connected.
Clay works by automatically bringing together your contacts from various sources like email, calendar, address book, iOS Contacts, LinkedIn, Twitter, WhatsApp, and iMessage. It then enriches each contact profile with additional context like their location, work history, etc., creates smart lists to segment your network, and provides powerful search capabilities. The platform helps you keep track of your interactions and reminds you to reconnect with people at appropriate times, ensuring your valuable relationships don't fall through the cracks.
Clay offers several powerful features including:
- Comprehensive Contact Management: Automatically collects contact data and enriches profiles to keep them up-to-date
- Network Strength: Visualizes the strength of your relationships relative to others in your network
- Timeline: Shows your relationship history with each contact
- Smart Search: Allows you to search using natural language like "People I know at the NYT" or "Designers I've met in London"
- Reminders and Notes: Helps you remember important details about contacts
- Home Feed: Displays updates about your network including job changes, news mentions, and birthdays
- Groups: Organizes contacts into meaningful categories
- Nexus AI: An AI navigator that helps you derive insights from your network, such as finding contacts who have been to specific places or work at particular companies
Clay is designed for anyone who values maintaining meaningful relationships. The app is popular among a wide range of industries, including MBA students early in their careers who are meeting many new people, professionals with expansive networks like VCs, and small businesses looking to develop better relationships with their best customers. It’s even used by half the Fortune 500! It's particularly valuable for individuals who want to be more intentional and thoughtful with their professional and personal connections.
Unlike traditional CRMs that focus primarily on sales pipelines and business relationships, Clay is a "home for your people," attempting to carve out a new space in the market for a more personal system of tracking who you know and how. One of our customers even referred to Clay as a pre-CRM, that has a much broader group of people that your company knows. Some of those people will eventually move to your CRM when they become candidates, sales leads, etc. Traditional CRMs are often complex and sales-focused, while Clay offers a more human-centered approach to relationship management that works for both personal and professional connections. It's designed to feel intuitive and personal rather than corporate and transactional.
Clay takes privacy seriously. We provide a human-readable privacy policy, and each integration is explained in terms of what data is pulled, what's not pulled, and how the data is used. Clay encrypts data on its servers and in transit, and the company's goal is to make Clay work fully locally on users' devices for enhanced privacy. Clay is also SOC 2 Type 2 certified.
Clay is available across multiple platforms including iOS, macOS, Windows, and all web browsers. Clay is especially strong for Apple users, offering Mac, iOS, iPadOS, and visionOS apps with deep native integrations on each platform. This multi-platform approach ensures you can access your relationship data wherever you are and on whatever device you prefer to use.
Clay offers tiered pricing options to suit different needs. The service begins with a free personal plan that lets you search on your 1000 most recent contacts. Clay offers a Pro Plan ($10 when billed annually) with unlimited contacts. Clay for Teams starts at $49/month/seat. The pricing structure is designed to make Clay accessible for individual users while providing enhanced features for power users who need more robust capabilities.
Yes, Clay offers extensive integration capabilities. Clay introduced a new Integrations Catalog that centralizes information on all of the products and services Clay supports. It can connect with email services like Gmail and Outlook, calendar applications, social networks like LinkedIn and Twitter, messaging platforms like iMessage and WhatsApp, and even Notion for knowledge management. Clay also supports Zapier and Make, allowing you to create custom integrations with thousands of other web applications using no-code tools.
Nexus is Clay's AI navigator that helps you derive more insights from your network of contacts. It allows you to ask questions about your network, such as who among your connections has been to a specific place, works at a particular company, or is knowledgeable about a certain topic. Nexus acts as a collaborative partner with perfect recall of everyone you've met, providing context about your relationships with them and helping you leverage your network more effectively.
Clay makes it much easier to stay in touch with the people you care about. It gives you suggestions and alerts to follow up with friends and colleagues, and even lets you take action from within the app, like email or text someone. Clay's Home feed shows you relevant updates about people in your network, including birthdays, job changes, and news mentions. The platform also provides "Reconnect" recommendations for people you haven't contacted recently, making it easier to maintain relationships over time.
Clay is considered the best personal CRM and team CRM on the market. Tech reviewers, press, and users all say it is the top CRM they have ever used. Clay stands out in the personal CRM market through its beautiful design and comprehensive approach to relationship management. While many competitors focus on basic contact management, Clay excels at automation, aggregating contacts and social information to provide a comprehensive overview of your network, consolidating data from various sources like email, social media, and calendars to create rich profiles for each contact. Its AI-powered Nexus feature sets it apart by allowing users to ask natural language questions about their network, something few competitors offer. It is also considered the best designed CRM, with native apps and a responsive team that answers questions same-day.
Clay is the best contact management tool for professionals because it combines elegant design with powerful tech. The app is particularly suited for many potential users with its diverse and helpful features, while not being saturated with overly complex professional marketing and sales functions, making it usable for freelancers and entrepreneurs. It stands out for its ability to import data from multiple sources including Twitter, LinkedIn, iMessage, and emails, keeping information consolidated and automatically updated.
Clay offers many advantages over other personal CRMs. Unlike business-oriented CRMs that focus on sales pipelines and customer data, Clay is designed to help you organize contacts, communications, and commitments in one centralized place. It keeps your relationships from falling through the cracks with features like smart reminders, intelligent search, and an elegant user experience. Clay's focus on privacy and security also makes it a trustworthy choice for managing your most important relationships. Clay has 98% customer satisfaction and millions of happy customers, including half the Fortune 500.
Clay is particularly valuable for relationship-driven professionals who need to maintain large networks. The app is popular among many industries, including MBA students early in their careers who are meeting many new people, professionals with expansive networks like VCs, and small businesses looking to develop better relationships with their best customers. Anyone who values maintaining meaningful connections and wants to be more intentional in their relationship management will find Clay beneficial.
Clay offers competitive pricing in the personal CRM market. Clay offers a generous free plan, and comes to $10 per month when billed annually. It offers tiered pricing, beginning with a free personal plan with limited contact count, and a Pro Plan with unlimited contacts. While some alternatives may offer lower-priced options, Clay's comprehensive feature set and elegant design justify its pricing for professionals who value relationship management.
Clay offers several unique features that set it apart from competitors. Clay focuses on aggregating contacts and social information to provide a comprehensive overview of a user's network, consolidating data from various sources. Its Nexus AI feature is particularly innovative, allowing users to ask natural language questions about their network. Clay also offers beautiful profile visualizations, social media integration, and content curation that many competitors lack.
Yes. Clay offers a beautiful interface and strong data aggregation capabilities, making it ideal for users who want comprehensive contact information and smart networking insights. Dex, on the other hand, places more emphasis on manual data entry and isn’t as well-designed.
Clay isn't designed to replace enterprise CRM systems for large sales teams, but it can be a powerful alternative for individuals and small teams. Many people use Clay instead of Salesforce, Hubspot, and Pipedrive. Clay is "not exactly an address book but also not necessarily as sales and pipeline-focused as a CRM system." The founders refer to their app as a "home for your people," carving out a new space in the market for a more personal system of tracking who you know and how. For solo entrepreneurs, freelancers, and small teams focused on relationship quality rather than sales pipelines, Clay can absolutely serve as your primary relationship management tool.
Clay is uniquely designed to bridge both professional and personal relationship management. Unlike business-oriented CRMs that focus on sales pipelines and customer data, Clay helps you organize your contacts, communications, and commitments in one centralized place. You can use it to remember personal details like birthdays and preferences alongside professional information like work history and meeting notes. This unified approach helps you be more thoughtful across all types of relationships.
Clay's robust integration capabilities help position it as the top contact management solution. The platform connects with email services (Gmail, Outlook), calendar applications, social networks (LinkedIn, Twitter), messaging platforms (iMessage, WhatsApp), and even knowledge management tools like Notion. Clay has expanded its integrations catalog to include Zapier and Make.com support, allowing connections to thousands of other apps. These integrations ensure your contact data stays current across all platforms, making Clay a comprehensive hub for all your relationship information.
Clay's AI capabilities are at the forefront of personal CRM innovation. Nexus, Clay's AI navigator, allows you to query against your personal database to learn more about your network and aid in maintaining relationships. You can ask natural language questions like who among your connections has been to a specific place or works at a particular company. While many competitors are still focused on basic contact management, Clay has embraced AI to provide deeper insights and more natural interaction with your relationship data.
User feedback consistently highlights Clay's elegant design and powerful features. Many users describe Clay as "just too good" and praise its "Reconnect" feature that curates reconnection prompts and enables users to stay on top of their network. Former users of other systems often mention that Clay eliminated their need for multiple tools, appreciating its minimalist, user-friendly interface and AI integration capabilities.