T4G Case Study
THE CHALLENGE
How might the Tech for Good Symposium skill-based volunteers support re:work in improving its data management and organization effectiveness to scale its ability to train and develop Black and Latinx community members?
PARTNER CONTEXT
The Tech for Good Symposium is a network of Tech and Data for Good practitioners that are using their technology and data resources and skills to address issues in the communities where we live and work. Through the symposium, 5 companies who are traditional competitors came together to work on a social problem, pooling their employee skills, and resources. Participating companies included CDW, Dell Technologies, JP Morgan Chase, LOB, and Two Sigma.
Specifically, the innovation produced by volunteers at the Tech for Good Symposium went towards supporting the nonprofit group re:work to improve their data management and organization.
ABOUT RE:WORK
Established in 2016, re:work’s mission is to create workplaces that reflect the diversity of their neighbourhoods. They are a non-profit organization working to empower Black and Latinx individuals by providing job training and placement opportunities in the Chicago area. re:work focuses specifically on BDR, SDR, or AE positions within the tech industry’s revenue generation side- one that is often overlooked by others who only focus their time training people how to code or work as developers. re:work currently has one trainee cohort per quarter.
"Our candidate experience is much more automated which saves our team time, allows us to reach more candidates at a time and reduces human error that leads to less than ideal candidate experiences"
"(The integration of the tech stack) means that we can serve more candidates without stretching our small team"
"To have someone else take the mental bandwidth off of us, we are a small team of four, so for what was delivered, we appreciate the effort that went into it. It also helped us to think more critically about the process"
"User experience– the number of people that we serve or who want us to serve them, has increased dramatically within the last two years. In some aspects it broke our system and this allowed us to keep up"
"Automation allows us to ensure that each person gets the same treatment and it creates consistency"
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You can learn more at https://rework.withgoogle.com/
THE INNOVATION
Prior to the symposium, re:work staff reported that their data management process took on a fragmented approach that required a lot of employees’ resources and time to operate. re:work leveraged four key softwares throughout their programming life-cycle: 1) Salesforce to store and manage data on their candidates and to document growth (registration, program participation, employment), 2) a Learning Management System (powered by MindTickle LMS) to support independent learning and learning management. 3) Huntr to help participants track job applications, and 4) HireVue to assess participants’ job readiness across multiple dimensions. re:work requested that volunteers support them to automate and sync their data collection in order to free up organizational and employee bandwidth.
In solving this problem, V2I supported each symposium company to recruit one Project Manager (PM) with API familiarity, software system admin, and/or Salesforce admin skills. This team of PMs were then responsible for drafting technical requirements for re:works’ (RW) top 5 prioritized needs that they outlined in the initial project scoping document. Each PM was responsible for overseeing a team of 3-8 volunteers who were in charge of addressing and documenting one of the five integration or automation tasks.
OUTCOMES
- Increased the integration of re:work’s tech stack including linking tools such as Huntr, Salesforce, Community, and MindTickle to reduce employee time
- Increased organizational effectiveness
- Increased the number of individuals re:work can support
- Guidelines documenting the current state of re:works tech stack and clear instructions on how to maintain it going forward to support institutional knowledge management and knowledge translation
"(I liked) getting to work with other companies towards a common nonprofit goal. I also learned a new skill"
"I liked the technical learning from other companies, such as learning about Salesforce"
“(I developed a) better understanding of the internal processes of a small bootstrapped nonprofit”
“It’s always fun to meet new people and do good things”
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BY THE NUMBERS…
- 100% of volunteer respondents were either likely or extremely likely to participate in another pro bono volunteer project
- 100% of volunteer respondents were either likely or extremely likely to recommend working at their company to a peer
- 100% of volunteer respondents gained a deeper understanding of the challenges faced by nonprofits
- 75% of volunteer respondents were either likely or extremely likely to recommend participating in a volunteer project to a friend or colleague
- 50% of volunteer respondents felt that their work was extremely likely to have had a positive impact on supporting re:work
- 15 hours a week of nonprofit staff time was reported to have been saved as a result of the project deliverables
- Nonprofit staff reported that they felt empowered to leverage what was produced by the T4G Symposium skill-based volunteers