Who Gives a Crap Case Study
Source: Whogivesacrap.org
Insights from Kate Sherburn, Legal Beagle (aka head of legal) at Who Gives a Crap
How Checklist Legal co-created Who Gives a Crap’s contracts, and personalised them with their playful DNA.
About Who Gives a Crap
Who Gives a Crap sells cool toilet paper with a conscience. An Aussie-based social enterprise, they donate 50% of profits from their toilet paper, hand towel and tissue sales (and also delightful shampoo, conditioner and body bars through their sister brand Good Time) to help ensure everyone on earth has access to a toilet and safe water. Their products are also ethically produced and eco-conscious. Who Gives a Crap stands out amongst their competitors with bright prints and cheeky slogans, like Good for your bum. Great for the World. This sense of playfulness and liberal sprinkling of toilet humour is not just a marketing ploy: it’s a fun, creative, innovative approach to business and social enterprise that is baked into the DNA of the business.
Source: Whogivesacrap.org
The Challenge
Source: Whogivesacrap.org
Who Gives a Crap is customer-centric, with a flair for applying design thinking across the business. To deliver on their ambitious social commitments, the Insights and Customer Experience teams use deep insight into their consumers to deliver faster innovation, delight current customers, and attract new ones. Kate Sherburn, Legal Beagle (aka head of legal) at Who Gives a Crap, knew that the business’s contracts would benefit from a similar human-centred approach.
When Kate first joined the team, the NDA and consulting agreements were too formal for Who Gives a Crap’s brand identity and ethos. The documents didn’t reflect how Who Gives a Crap wanted to be perceived, nor what it actually felt like to interact with the business.
“Particularly for a business like Who Gives a Crap, where we pride ourselves on transparency and accessibility, incomprehensible legal agreements are just not how we roll. Anything that makes legal documents more accessible for the end user, so they actually understand the agreement they’re entering into, is worth its weight in gold.”
The internal processes underpinning the contract creation and delivery also needed streamlining. Kate was keen to make it easier for staff to self-serve, to reduce the time she spent responding to queries.
The Solution
As a time-poor inhouse lawyer or ‘YOLO’ (your only legal officer), Kate wanted the support of an experienced contract design specialist to transform her contracts. When someone from the creative team spotted Verity’s upcoming Contract Design session at Melbourne Design Week, Kate knew she’d found a collaborator. With an emphasis on design thinking and humanising contracts, Verity’s approach aligned with the down-to-earth, social ethos of Who Gives a Crap.
Verity quickly grasped who Who Gives a Crap were as a business, including what was important to them, their tone of voice, and what they wanted to achieve for their contracts. Verity and Kate initially worked closely on developing the non-disclosure agreement (NDA). Verity then ran a series of interactive workshops with the People and Culture and Marketing teams, to refine five different consulting agreements into one umbrella agreement.
Source: Whogivesacrap.org
“One of our co-founders has a background in design thinking, so it’s very much a part of our business. But even with that context, Verity’s been able to bring insights that none of us have thought about. I think that’s what comes with her experience, when you do this with different companies. She gets to take a step back and look at the bigger picture. When you are ‘in the weeds’ day to day, you don’t have the opportunity to do this.”
Verity’s interactive and innovative approach, combined with her extensive expertise in contract design, extended the thinking and contributions of the Who Gives a Crap team. This helped her to design both contracts in a way that was uniquely personalised to the business.
The Results
Making legal accessible
According to Kate, an NDA is commonly known as the most boring document in the world. But not in Verity’s hands! Although the NDA was in okay shape when Verity first came onboard, it was dense and difficult to navigate. Kate briefed Verity to transform long slabs of text into something more accessible, design-led and engaging.
Verity rewrote the document by reducing the readability age, removing passive sentences, and decreasing the number of words in each sentence – without compromising the legal integrity of the contract. The document was instantly easier to understand for non-legal types. She also embedded chatty, explanatory annotations within the contract, at those points where complex legal wording needed to remain.
Both Who Gives a Crap and Checklist Legal are known for their belief in the power of emojis to convey a unique message and mood. Who Gives a Crap handed their entire suite of bespoke icons to Verity, who cleverly incorporated them into the NDA.
Overall, the contract has been a hit!
“We very rarely think that an NDA, which is commonly known as the most boring document in the world, can be engaging. But we had someone say that they liked signing the NDA so much, that they wish they hadn’t seen it – so they could see it again for the first time!”
Engaging staff through co-creation of documents and process
Creating and redesigning the contracts has been a truly collaborative process between Who Gives a Crap and Checklist Legal. Verity’s inclusive and iterative way of working resonated with the way the team approaches all their activities:
When designing the consolidated consulting agreement, Verity leveraged the insights of the Legal, People and Culture, and Marketing teams through a series of workshops over Zoom. Rather than presenting a finished solution, she mocked up three different options based on their input. The team then workshopped which visuals worked best. This process of co-creation not only reflected the authentic voice and needs of staff, but created a sense of ownership over the final document.
“We say we don’t take ourselves seriously. But we take what we do seriously. And that comes through with everyone in the business. There’s a sense of collaboration amongst the team, and we are all working towards the same goal.”
Improving efficiencies by helping staff to self-serve
The Who Gives a Crap legal team are already seeing the benefits of their contract design work with Verity. There have been less enquiries from confused or uncertain team members, and a faster turnaround to receive documents back.
In order to quickly reap the benefits of the NDA redesign, Kate temporarily set up a template in DocuSign. This immediately reduced the administrative burden on the legal team. This step is just the first in a planned roll out of a fully automated system. Likewise, there are also plans in motion to automate the final consulting agreement.
“We used to get questions back about the NDA. But now, it reflects how we like to do business. It’s clear and really transparent in what everyone’s obligations are and what this actually means for them.”
The benefits of working with Checklist Legal
Despite the complex subject matter of the NDA and consulting agreement, Verity made the concepts and content accessible to all staff who collaborated on the design process.
“Working with Verity has been a very enjoyable, easy process. It doesn’t matter who has been involved in this process; everyone’s expressed how simple Verity has made it.”
Verity achieved her goal of making the law accessible and engaging, by involving staff in the process to create contracts. The documents align to the ways people in the team work and think, and give clarity and confidence to anyone who needs to read and sign them. Most importantly, Who Gives a Crap now has a growing suite of legal documents that instantly communicate their relaxed, light-hearted and people-centred brand and culture.
Services accessed:
Contract design
Preparation for Automation
Legal Design Workshops
Legal Process Mapping
Our Human Centred Legal Design Framework
Poke
Explore priorities and find focus
Plan
Create a powerful plan to solve real identified issues
Perform
Add visible value and do it efficiently!
Produce
Build your brand and increase your impact
From the Checklist Legal HCD Contract Operations Framework, these workshops and the contract re-design work were in the Plan and Perform categories.
Want to know more about Who Gives a Crap and Kate Sherburn the Legal Beagle herself?
You can connect with Kate on Linkedin
To find out more about Who Gives a Crap and to get your hands on some eco-friendly toilet paper you can visit their website here
And to learn more about WGAC’s plastic free soap brand Good Time, you can find their website here.
Source: Whogivesacrap.org
Are you looking for help curating a suite of legal documents that compliment your brands voice, values and customers needs?
Book in a chat with Checklist Legal to discuss your own Contract Operations Strategy with Verity White.
