Always Give with Love
by Ellen Li
With the advent of remote working technologies like Zoom and Slack, people continue to innovate new ways to make an impact without being physically present. One organization leveraging the power of remote work for good is GIVE (Global Initiative to Volunteer Expertise).
Founded by a group of IBM consultants in 2013, GIVE is a group of passionate professionals dedicated to volunteering their time and skills to solve business problems for nonprofit organizations. GIVE projects are executed by volunteer IBM consultants who have demonstrated strong leadership, outstanding professional skills and experience, and a passion for social impact.
Over the last six months, I’ve had the pleasure of serving as a GIVE Project Manager for a wonderful organization called With Love. With Love is a Portland-based nonprofit dedicated to serving the local foster community. Their priority is to provide safe, clean, and quality clothing and supplies for foster children ages 0–6.
With Love was interested in hosting replication seminars to expand the network of tangible goods donations for foster families in the Oregon area. These seminars would establish self-selecting groups passionate about serving the foster care community and enable them to start their own nonprofits to serve their local areas.
With these goals in mind, I worked with the client to scope out the key milestones and deliverables of the project. We determined that the end product would be a replication seminar playbook, which is a toolkit that would allow With Love to obtain seminar funding and effectively host educational, network-building workshops for foster-dedicated groups.
Once we had our Statement of Work finalized, our GIVE team of five consultants got right to it.
The first area we tackled was identifying key seminar focus areas by understanding With Love’s organizational structure and operations. By breaking down the layers of complexity in starting and running a foster-focused nonprofit, we could target the fundamental building blocks that would be critical for a nonprofit founder to know. The team pored over existing client materials and hosted working sessions to document the operating model, volunteer outreach and functions, and monetary and material donation processes.
Once we completed our current state analysis, our next step was taking those concepts and bringing the abstract seminar vision to life. We knew which topics we wanted to highlight in the seminars, and we wanted to ensure that information would be communicated effectively with a drive towards action. Key to this process was creating stakeholder personas and defining seminar KPIs. Who will be attending the seminars? What are their motivations? What are their pain points? What do we want them to do with this education? These were some of the questions we asked as we built out each persona. Understanding the key players, we could define what successful participant outcomes would entail and the detailed seminar agenda that would help participants achieve those results.
From there, we needed to figure out how to reach our target audience. The ideal applicant would be deeply involved with the foster care community and have taken steps to realize their nonprofit creation. Our resulting campaign should not only garner superficial interest but also set expectations for completing stellar, thoughtful applications by serious candidates. These were points our team kept in mind as we crafted the application process and seminar promotional strategy. The application would consist of thoughtful questions to showcase applicants’ demonstrated interest in utilizing the seminar education. In tandem, With Love’s multimedia channels would not only serve as promotional vehicles, but also insightful guides for what With Love would be expecting from submissions. Thus target applicants would have a path forward to be successful in the application process.
The final piece was to define a follow-up engagement strategy. Empowering participants to proactively build networks for support and accountability would set them up for long-term success in their nonprofit endeavors. We wanted to ensure that enthusiasm and support would continue post-event as participants undertook the sizable task of building out their nonprofits. Our GIVE team developed a timeline and strategy for engagement with participants. With Love would provide initial support and check-ins as business plans are finalized and next steps outlined. Thereafter, With Love would take a step back as participants are encouraged to lead and structure future touchpoints on their nonprofit journeys.
And that concluded six months of effort! Shoutout to the team (Sarah, Ryan, Nancy, Katie, and Kristin) for their hard work and With Love for being a fantastic client partner. Our team is grateful that we had the opportunity to give back to the foster community cause. We are so excited to see where With Love will go as they empower others to expand the material support network for foster families across Oregon.
