Rebuilding Trust at Scale
A Product Portfolio Study — UC Santa Barbara, 2012–2019
6 min read
UC Santa Barbara's campus tour program was in active institutional crisis when I took on its leadership. Tour guides were threatening to strike, the campus was recovering from national tragedy, and a top-10 public university with an extraordinary academic record was broadly perceived as a party school. The brand did not match the product, and the people responsible for closing that gap didn't trust the institution asking them to do it.
Over three years as professional staff, and seven years total at UCSB, I diagnosed the root cause, then built five interconnected products to address it: a homegrown applicant tracking system, a redesigned training program, a 0→1 social media presence, internal communications infrastructure, and a complete tour experience redesign. The result was a nationally recognized program serving over 50,000 visitors annually, with measurable improvements in quality, efficiency, and institutional trust.
Problem
In spring 2014, three things were simultaneously true about UC Santa Barbara:
It was a top-10 public university nationally, with more Nobel laureates than any other public institution in the preceding fifteen years. It had just experienced the Isla Vista mass shooting and a separate riot — both with sustained national media coverage — at the precise moment when prospective students and families were forming impressions of the campus. And it was broadly, persistently perceived as a party school. The brand did not match the product.
Inside the campus tour program, things were no better. The Gaucho Tour Association, 75 student guides employed by the Admissions office, was in open conflict with Admissions leadership. Guides were threatening to strike. The tension had calcified into an us-versus-them culture: students had built a shadow Facebook group specifically to exclude Admissions staff, alternate names for the organization circulated as acts of subtle defiance, and everyday language was laced with resentment toward the office they reported to.
Guides loved UCSB. They identified fiercely with the campus, but they were completely alienated from the department employing them to show that love. That gap was a huge problem to solve.
I was tasked with taking this program in crisis and turning it around quickly.
Research
Before taking on any leadership role, I studied the organization I was about to lead.
I conducted a formal cultural analysis of the GTA: structured interviews across every level of the hierarchy, including guides, mid-level student leaders, and admissions professional staff. I analyzed written artifacts: the shadow Facebook group, a petition about dress code, the job application guides had designed themselves. I studied the language people used to describe the organization and each other.
Insights
What the research surfaced was not a communication problem or a management problem. It was an identity crisis. Guides didn't feel like they were part of Admissions, they felt like contractors hired to perform a version of themselves desired by administrators. The resentment wasn't irrational. It was a signal.
That diagnosis changed everything that followed. The products I eventually built weren't just program improvements. They were trust infrastructure designed to close the gap between what UCSB actually was and what the people representing it believed about themselves and the institution.
The research came first. Everything else followed from it.
Solution
The Portfolio
What followed wasn't a single project. It was five interconnected products serving two distinct user groups: the prospective students and families visiting campus, and the 40–80 student guides who served them. Both had to work: you couldn't fix the external experience without fixing the internal one first.
01 — Instagram (0→1 Platform)
Make the campus legible before anyone arrives
Before I was hired as staff, I was a student volunteer who saw the gap and started filling it. UCSB had no dedicated social presence for prospective students. I built one from scratch, growing the account to 1,300 followers in two months using a content strategy grounded in communication theory: every post paired peripheral-route content (campus beauty, emotional resonance) with central-route content (Nobel laureates, research rankings, academic distinction). The goal was to change what UCSB meant before a family ever set foot on campus.
Outcome: 1,300 followers in 2 months. 15% additional growth during professional staff tenure. Snapchat launch reached 2,000+ additional daily media impressions.
02 — Applicant Tracking System (Homegrown, Airtable)
Fix the pipeline before scaling the people
The guide recruitment process was paper-based, physically distributed, and informal. Pickup was required in person. Personal referral was the dominant sourcing channel. The result: a homogeneous guide cohort, significant access barriers for students without existing connections to the program, and a filing system dependent on a single location.
The problem wasn't volume. It was fairness.
I designed and built a custom ATS in Airtable with parallel multi-reviewer workflows, demographic data collection and diversity reporting to leadership, scoring normalization to detect reviewer drift, and applicant notification automation. The forcing function arrived when a fire evacuation in the building housing 400+ paper applications made the fragility of the existing system impossible to ignore.
Outcome: 502 applications received — a program record. First formalized diversity tracking in program history.
03 — Training Program Redesign
Build guides who believe what they're saying
The training program was transactional. Guides learned logistics, not identity. They knew tour routes but not why any of it mattered. Given the institutional crisis and the brand-reality gap, this was the wrong program for the moment.
I rewrote the tour manual, redesigned the onboarding structure, launched the program's first-ever Fall Retreat, and built a continual training calendar embedded with campus partners — giving guides reasons to go deeper into the institution they were representing. The goal was guides who didn't just know UCSB's facts but who genuinely believed its story.
Outcome: Rated Exceeds Expectations by supervisor. Guide retention improved measurably.
04 — Internal Communications (Slack + Digital Scheduling)
Replace the shadow system with something better — then instrument it
The shadow Facebook group — the one that excluded Admissions staff — wasn't just a morale problem. It was a symptom of fragmented internal communication across 80+ guides. Scheduling failures, inconsistent tour quality, and institutional distrust all traced back to the same root: guides had built their own system because the official one didn't work.
The fix wasn't a policy. It was two products working together.
First, I selected, implemented, and drove adoption of Slack across the entire guide staff — replacing the informal shadow channel with something that actually served their needs and included everyone. Second, I digitized the scheduling system, moving from manual coordination to a platform that gave us real data for the first time: who was showing up, how often, how tour loads were distributed, and where patterns of inconsistency were concentrated.
Together, these weren't just communication improvements. They were the foundation for a culture of accountability that didn't exist before — one grounded in shared visibility rather than top-down enforcement. For the first time, norms around attendance and performance had data behind them.
Outcome: The shadow Facebook group became inactive within months. Scheduling data enabled the first systematic tracking of guide performance and tour quality across the program.
05 — Campus Tour Experience Redesign
Standardize the container, preserve the soul
Every other product was in service of this one. The tour itself — the live, in-person experience where a prospective student's impression of UCSB was formed — was the core product. And it had a serious problem.
Guides had always been given significant interpretive freedom. That freedom was a feature — personality was what made tours work. But without structure, variance had become untenable. Some guides ran 90-minute tours in 90 minutes. Others ran 3-hour tours in the same slot. Visitors were returning to their cars to find parking tickets. It was unprofessional, and it was actively harming the experience the program existed to create.
Meanwhile, campus leadership had requested that the route be redesigned to highlight institutional priorities. Three stakeholders, competing needs: leadership wanted the route to serve strategy. Guides needed their personality preserved. Visitors needed a predictable, punctual experience.
The redesign standardized the container without scripting the content. I established a defined route with clear time allocations per segment. Within those segments, guides retained full interpretive freedom — what they said, how they said it, what stories they told. The manual was rewritten to reflect this structure, and every guide was trained on both the new route and the principle behind it: consistency is what makes personality possible at scale.
Outcome: Volume grew 40% year-over-year. Average group size dropped from 19.2 to 15.7. Tours started ending on time. More visitors, better experience, no more parking tickets.
Outcome
2016-2017 Tour Program Metrics (Year 1)
Metric | Result |
|---|---|
Visitors served YoY | +40% (39,936 visitors · 2,545 tours) |
Average tour group size | 19.2 → 15.7 (quality improved as volume grew) |
Guide applications | 502 (program record) |
Annual overhead reduction | $20,000+ |
National conference presentations | 2× (CIVSA) |
Instagram growth from 0 | 1,300 followers in 2 months |
The strike threat was resolved. The shadow Facebook group became inactive. Guide retention improved. The program received national recognition in its industry. And UCSB — a campus that had spent years being defined by its party reputation and, in 2014, by tragedy — had a stronger, more honest story being told live, every day, by guides who finally believed it themselves.
Reflection
The UCSB portfolio is the earliest evidence I have of something I've since done in different forms across every role: I don't just execute on defined problems. I go looking for the actual problem, and then I build the infrastructure needed to elegantly solve it.
In this case, the actual problem was an identity and trust crisis wearing the costume of a tour program. Understanding the real problem before I had any authority to build anything was what made the strategic response clear to me, and this created a reflex to always ask where is it actually meaningful to intervene.