Collaborative Strategy Design

Overview

This project aimed to understand volunteer challenges and needs, to identify key opportunities to uplift their ability to make an impact.

The exact challenges were unclear, but we did know that there was a need to improve operational efficiency as volunteers felt their work was hindered by operations.

We eventually outlined the following objectives:

• Opportunities to uplift internal operation efficiency

• Informational and decision making flow

• Leveraging resources

Approach

The project followed the Double Diamond approach, as we needed to understand what the full scope of the challenges was, before heading into solutioning.

We first aimed to understand as much as possible - this meant interviewing stakeholders, exploring existing information, and researching the competition.

Objectives were defined at the end of the Define stage, allowing us to descope items that wouldn't fit into our timeline or we didn't have resources for.

Challenge Streams

A problem we uncovered was that many volunteers felt disempowered due to their position title, and not knowing where their authority started or ended. It became very clear that volunteers had similar yet distinct challenges depending on what role they played in the organisation. Therefore, a large emphasis on representation (of roles) in ideation and prioritisation sessions.

This included equal representation in discovery (interviewing), challenge priortisation and risk assessment, solution ideation, and solution priortisation.

Outcome

The initiative provided the leadership team with a clear roadmap and a number of initiatives to improve their internal operations.

For the local representatives, this also provided the opportunity to have challenges that were traditionally had no clear platform to voice, to directly shape the internal operations strategy of the organisation.

It also provided an opportunity for a number of the global governance team members to build relationships with the local representatives 1-1.

Since the review, 6 initiatives have started. 2 have already been completed.