Prathima's Miles & Milestones

Charity begins at home and continues at work

Scenario

The head of CSR at a large enterprise with about 35,000 employees has set up an employee volunteering app. He thought that it’d be a great way to keep employees engaged outside of their work hours. He ensures that all employees should get access to a variety of opportunities from different impact areas, and he believes, curating volunteering opportunities could be a great starting point.

On the other hand, most of the employees feel they are already loaded with work and don’t believe that volunteering is a great way to unwind. However, a few do!

What are the key Strategies and respective product features you would build in the long run for wider adoption? Build a sample Sprint 1 (only) user story document. Make the necessary assumptions.

Bonus: Design a GTM Strategy.

Problem Statement

• The CSR team onboards their partner NGOs who regularly post opportunities for the employee volunteers. Only a few, who care enough, apply and show up for most of the opportunities, some
  opportunities never get any applicants.

Attempts

The CSR team did the following feature improvements to drive adoption.

• Mobile-friendly Web App
• SSO with Outlook, so no password to remember.
• Added Fundraisers, and quick learning programs that offer certification.
• Gamification with leaderboards.
• Also announces Changemaker of the month.

Despite doing all of this, the usage increased by about 10%, but new users are still not signing up!

The objective of the Enterprise is to drive the consumption of the portal across all the employees.

Note: Users and volunteers can be used as synonyms in this context.

Assumptions

• Employees now, public later on as the user base grows with more events to cater.
• There’s a CMS (Content Management Service) which is set up for CRUD operations of events like creating an event, or editing an event, setting up a max limit of volunteers, approval/unapproval of a volunteer, adding images, rating, etc concerning a particular event which is fetched by the frontend/app/website.
• The NGO serves various categories like — orphanages, old age homes, & other humanitarian causes.
• The NGO is recognized by the govt & follows all legal accounts & practices for inmates, volunteers, & all the people getting benefitted with.

Key strategies

• Demonstrate the value, instilling the feel-good factor in the volunteers by highlighting the impact of their input.
• Providing volunteers with lots of information about the people that have and continue to benefit from donations.
• Emails tailored to those who have started donating their time to showcase to the rest of the team to pool in for the joy of giving.

Product Features

• Integrate personalization and tailored elements. Eg: Events related to kids’ education, educating the elderly, food distribution, health checkups, etc.
• Allows volunteers to control the amount they give with a simple swipe, and finally, there is also a real-time element, alerting volunteers to current and ongoing crises (along with the option to provide support)
• The MVP of the app needs to — Take Donations, allow users to submit forms to your charity, create custom content, take questions from users through your messaging service, use push notifications to send updates about what your charity is doing, allow you to sell merchandise by setting up a mCommerce store, etc.
• Messaging features on the app can be used as a form of communication. Connecting with the younger, more mobile-savvy demographic.
• Addition of a Payment solution that lets organizations handle donations on one platform and is trusted by over nonprofit customers.
• The inclusion of embracing voice search will enable targeting a more tech-savvy based audience as they will be more likely to find something that will fit into their daily lives and make a task like donating easier and quicker.
• Connecting with social media integrations for blogging, and going live on YT, and IG — allow people to find themselves inside the crisis and develop empathy and the desire to help.
• The users to win points for every volunteer event successfully attended & can claim additional benefits at the workplace.
• The referral program helps to bring in more volunteers to win karma points when the referee joins an event.
• Every month there are definitely birthdays in the office. Celebrating one weekend clubbing all birthdays together by volunteering will be a memorable cause.
• Organizing marathons promoting the organization with the registration fee donated to the charity is a heart-touching gesture & strikes a chord with potential employees & clients.
• The organization publishing the articles/posts of employees volunteering on the company’s website adds validation to the employees.
• The employees’ happiness quotient among those who volunteer always remains high than the ones who do not.
• “Pair up with another volunteer” — Birds of the same feather flock together! Choose or get chosen to volunteer & divide the tasks which creates a great bond among like-minded people.
• Clock the no. of hours of weekends to get an additional day off at work for the noble cause & as a mark of respect for making a difference.
• Campaigns like TechIndia, Makeadifference, SOS (Save Our Souls), & many such causes will add brownie points to the CV + makes one less greedy with the lifestyle of the youth & IT employees these days. One would prefer spending lesser in a pub vs educating a kid.
• Community food initiatives like connecting the nearby areas to contribute to eliminating food wastage, etc & many more initiatives can crop up with the help of tech of course.
• Youth mentoring program where the professionals help a number of unskilled students by guiding them in preparing CVs and learning how to enhance their skills to start their careers.
• School supplies can be donated every year by employees on a rotational basis. The Joy of giving month in December every year leaves employees with a satisfying year of accomplishments & gratitude.

GTM Strategies (Go-to-market Strategy)

• Posting on social media platforms telling the charity story, starting conversations with donors, volunteers, etc & raising awareness about the cause. When done right, helps in achieving organic reach and followings.
• Charities accepting donations via their mobile apps remain a largely underused strategy that could benefit charities to reach a younger demographic.
• A responsive website with a strong SEO is a consideration for miracles.
• Collect subscribers at fundraising events — Never miss an opportunity to grow your email list.
• Whether you’re scheduled to speak at an event or you’re attending a conference, be sure to pass out business cards that ask people to sign up for emails.
• Create Mobile-Friendly Content for emailers.
• Showing sincere thanks to your patrons for their donations strengthens their loyalty to your cause and makes them feel you really appreciate them. When you form emotional relationships, your subscribers become your most loyal advocates.
• Include special offers, giveaways, welcome, thank-you notes, or other incentives to encourage your subscribers to help your organization with monetary gifts or volunteer their time.
• Conduct entertainment programs like dance, skits, reading literature, crafts, etc to keep the inmates entertained & invite influencers who have big reach to promote the event for humanitarian causes.
• Track the success metrics for lessons.

Sprint 1 | User Stories

• As a user/volunteer, I want to see the events schedule for all the weekends for the current month in advance so that I enroll.
• As a user/volunteer, I want to view choose a date/from & to on the calendar & view the events in that duration so that I can enroll & make a difference.
• As a user/volunteer, I want the confirmation & calendar invite along with the location & timings to be shared/block my calendar.
• As a user/volunteer, I want to use filters for online/offline modes of volunteering, weekday & weekend events, financial help or physical presence, etc to plan my weekend.
• As a user/volunteer, I want to view my volunteer profile with the events I attended & my basic info like email, social media, location, age, gender, skills, disability, ailments, and professional status like working, student, or on a sabbatical, etc for my authentication.
• As a user/volunteer, I want to view the event description page with details like date, location, cause, no. of volunteers needed, the organizers, images from previous events, etc etc for my contribution.
• As a user/volunteer, I want to message the organizer for more event details to plan my day.
• As a user/volunteer, I expressed interest in a specific event and will go through my skills test before allotment to the same.
• As a user/volunteer, I want to earn points for every event I attend & contribute.
• As a user/volunteer, I want to earn karma points for every successful referral.
• As a user/volunteer, I want to win accolades for appearing on the website for my contribution off-work.
• As a user/volunteer, I want to drop off/mark a no-show to an enrolled event if I can’t make it due to personal emergencies.

P.S. Service to man is service to God. Work is worship, after all. Leave the world making it a better place than when you saw it. When life increases your standards of living, increase your standards of giving back to the society.

The more people interested in good deeds, the more society & humanity prevails.

Leading life as an example in society with the head held high should be the utmost respect.

Overall, this helps to reassure volunteers and build trust in the charity, with the technology also serving to forge a personal connection.