PROJECT CONTEXT
The CDW Social Impact team, alongside the CDW Legacy Excellence Program, teamed up with Venture 2 Impact for a one-day skills-based volunteer event. This initiative aimed to engage CDW’s Legacy Excellence fellows and interns in addressing a significant social challenge and creating real impact.
We collaborated with Per Scholas Chicago, a nonprofit that shares our commitment to equitable education and workforce diversity. Per Scholas provides free tech training and connects individuals often excluded from tech careers with employer networks. Their mission has empowered over 16,000 alumni to launch successful tech careers, promoting economic equity.
In this project, CDW Legacy Excellence fellows and interns developed a social media strategy to boost Per Scholas Chicago’s online presence, targeting donors, employers, and learners.
THE CHALLENGE
How might we support Per Scholas Chicago in developing a social media marketing strategy to grow their name recognition and social media engagement?
THE EXECUTION
We organized a one-day volunteer event to help CDW fellows and interns provide guidance and consulting to Per Scholas Chicago on their social media strategy by applying a human-centered design approach to understand the specific social media challenges faced by Per Scholas Chicago. This involved engaging in discussions with Per Scholas Chicago staff, volunteers, and CDW participants to uncover their current social media practices, challenges, and needs.
The design sprint included a series of structured activities designed to align project goals, empathize with Per Scholas Chicago’s challenges, and define specific needs. Our volunteers worked on developing creative solutions and strategies to capture and highlight testimonials, acknowledge volunteers and funders, increase followers, and improve engagement.
The day began with Per Scholas Chicago presenting the How Might We (HMW) statement and challenge context to set the stage for our work. We then facilitated a user persona exercise where volunteer teams developed detailed personas for different target audiences.
- Corporate Executive: Represented corporate decision-makers, specifically senior executives in tech companies, looking for skilled candidates from Per Scholas Chicago.
- Aspiring Tech Professional: Represented young, aspiring tech professionals, particularly aged 23-30, seeking career advancement and specialized training.
- Philanthropic Advocate: Represented philanthropists and community-focused individuals, interested in supporting causes with a personal touch and seeing tangible outcomes, such as success stories of Per Scholas graduates.
This was followed by creating customer journeys for each user persona, allowing the teams to gain insights into the experiences and needs of Per Scholas Chicago’s diverse audience.
Next, volunteers participated in the Crazy 8’s exercise to generate a wide range of ideas quickly. These ideas were then discussed and refined in groups, leading to the identification of the most promising concepts. To prioritize these ideas, we used a dotmocracy voting process where participants could vote on their favorite solutions.
The design sprint’s final recommendations led to the development of a tailored social media strategy, including innovative ways to capture and highlight testimonials, acknowledge volunteers and funders, increase followers, and enhance engagement. The top ideas included proposals such as highlighting impressive projects executed by alumni, editing posts to appeal to employers, creating more visibility and organizational consistency, maximizing efficiency with different social media features, and incorporating tours, live Q&A sessions, and behind-the-scenes (BTS) videos.
Each group presented their recommendations to Per Scholas Chicago staff, answering questions and providing detailed explanations to ensure clarity and feasibility. The implementation of these solutions is expected to significantly enhance Per Scholas Chicago’s social media presence by creating more engaging and relatable content, increasing follower count, and improving overall impact. Ultimately, this collaborative effort equipped Per Scholas Chicago with actionable insights and practical tools to effectively manage their social media, ensuring sustained growth and engagement over the next few years.
ANTICIPATED IMPACT
By developing a strategic plan for their social media marketing, Per Scholas would be able to increase their visibility and name recognition in the Chicago nonprofit community, improve their fundraising efforts, optimize the output of Per Scholas staff in time spent on social media, and ultimately increase donors, participants, and employer partners. A social media strategy would increase Per Scholas’ impact in the Chicago communities and the ability to execute their mission of advancing equity and increasing opportunity for careers in tech.
OUTCOMES
These innovations resulted in the following outcomes:
- Streamlined social media management for Per Scholas Chicago, making posting less work in the long run through the use of templates, best practices, and a plug-and-play social content calendar.
- Enhanced social media presence that inspires authentic engagement with Per Scholas Chicago.
- Effective showcasing of the genuine impact of Per Scholas Chicago programming on learners' lives, maintaining a respectful approach that goes beyond superficial gestures and genuinely reflects DEI values.
The following outcomes and insights are derived from responses collected through our feedback form. The responses indicate that Per Scholas Chicago staff have:
- Enhanced understanding among Per Scholas Chicago staff of their target audience.
- Significantly improved knowledge of social media strategy among Per Scholas Chicago staff.
- Substantially increased expertise in content creation for Per Scholas Chicago staff.
- Considerably advanced awareness of managing online presence for Per Scholas Chicago staff.
- Gained valuable insights into how fellows and interns use social media, including effective utilization of social media accounts, the importance of templates or timelines, and strategies for maximizing efficiency.
FEEDBACK
From our Partner
From the volunteers
Previous
Next
From PER SCHOLAS
Previous
Next
BY THE NUMBERS…
- Per Scholas is estimated to have saved 40 hours per week by utilizing the expertise of the volunteers, allowing their staff to focus on other critical tasks and advancing their mission more effectively.
- By translating this time saved into monetary value, it’s estimated that Per Scholas saved approximately $9,160, based on the average consulting rate of $229 per hour in 2024.
VOLUNTEERS
- 90% of respondents felt satisfied with the design sprint process overall
- 90% of respondents felt that their communication skills improved significantly.
- 80% of respondents felt that their leadership skills developed strongly.
- 100% of respondents felt that their presentation and public speaking skills improved considerably.
- 100% of respondents felt that their teamwork skills saw substantial growth.
- 90% of respondents felt that their creativity was greatly enhanced.
- 90% of respondents felt that their innovation skills improved significantly.
- 90% of respondents felt that their ability to utilize resources effectively increased.
- 90% of respondents would participate in future volunteer programs
CDW
- 100% of respondents rated their likelihood to recommend V2I to other organizations
- 100% of respondents felt that the volunteer program was highly effective in achieving their goals for engaging employees in impactful volunteer programming.
- 100% of respondents felt that the volunteer program was highly effective in achieving their corporate impact goals.
PER SCHOLAS
- 100% of participants felt the final recommendations were highly relevant, as all rated them as either relevant or highly relevant.
- 66.7% of participants expressed high confidence in implementing the recommendations.
- 100% of participants reported an improvement in understanding their target audience.
- 100% of participants felt their knowledge of social media strategy was enhanced.
- 100% of participants noted progress in their content creation skills.
- 100% of participants saw an improvement in their knowledge of online presence management.
- 66.7% of participants estimated it would take 4 weeks or more to complete the work themselves.
- 100% of participants felt the design sprint strengthened the relationship between Per Scholas Chicago and CDW.
- 100% of participants were satisfied with the design sprint process overall.
- 100% of participants praised CDW and expressed a strong likelihood of participating in future volunteer programs.
