A digital strategy to support women in need
Client:
Fitted for WorkChallenge:
- The changing not-for-profit landscape in Australia meant significant challenges in accessing resources, support, and donations
- With 35,000 services provided to women in Australia over 14 years, the organisation had grown significantly but was finding it difficult to attract funding to manage the next growth stage
- To stay relevant and viable strategies were required to address changes driven largely by digital technology
Solution:
- The co-creation of a digital strategy using a Human Centred Design approach utilising immersive research and industry trends
- Contextual interviews and ideation sessions with customers, volunteers and employees provided deep insights and behavioural personas which underpin the digital strategy
- Agile workshops to demonstrate how the organisation could evolve to a future workplace by selecting tools and techniques that work for them
Results:
- The resulting digital strategy provides a transformation roadmap with practical initiatives to support Fitted for Work’s vision and objectives
- Split into 1) People/Culture; 2) Tools/Technology; and 3) Physical Space the digital strategy will drive new ways of working for better customer experience
- The CEO now has much improved cases for potential funding from government, trusts, foundations, and large corporates
Fitted for Work (FFW) is a not-for-profit (NFP) organisation assisting women experiencing disadvantage and seeking employment. As an NFP, FFW relies heavily on donations, trusts and foundations for revenue, as well as their two social enterprises, the Conscious Closet, a recycled woman’s fashion store, and SheWorks, a paid recruitment service that connects employers with FFW’s work-ready customers. The company has 29 employees and more than 260 active volunteers who have helped over 33,000 women in Australia since 2005.
Challenge
The rapidly changing Australian NFP landscape is being disrupted by increasing competition, changing donor and delivery priorities, and persistent unpredictable market challenges. The public are more conscious of where they donate their hard-earned dollars feeling a stronger desire to participate in charitable giving – but giving only where they see measurable impact.
The act of contributing is also becoming highly peer-driven with research showing that seeing others give influences prospective donors to do the same. Donation channels are also changing driven largely by digital technology in connecting people, with more online and mobile donating than ever before.
To stay relevant and viable while supporting necessary growth, FFW required strategies to address the challenges of accessible resources, support and collaboration across people and services; while increasing company productivity, proactivity, and adaptability; and becoming even more customer centric. FFW wanted to appeal to more donors, and since it operates mostly with volunteers who are critical to the business, they recognised a need to better enable and nurture people.
Solution
DXC Consulting provided a dedicated team to co-create a digital strategy with FFW using a Human Centred Design approach anchored in immersive research and industry trends. Immersive research, contextual interviews, and ideation sessions involving FFW customers, volunteers and employees were conducted where insights were uncovered to support the development of behavioural personas, journey maps and empathy maps. This research informed the desire for future culture, technology and other changes.
Comprehensive ‘one pagers’ were developed showing a ‘day in the life of’ a customer, employee and volunteer, with current and desired future state presented. The resulting digital strategy provided a change roadmap outlining the entire transformation journey with practical initiatives to support FFW’s future vision and objectives.
The digital strategy is not a static document – but something FFW can reference every day with constant small increments achieved.
Results
The digital strategy is allowing FFW to conceptualise initiatives on growing the business, staying relevant, creating new revenue streams, and better engaging employees and volunteers, while reaching more disadvantaged women right across Australia.
The digital strategy helps FFW approach government, trusts and foundations – as well as large corporates for potential funding and partnerships. Resulting support will allow key insights proposed as part of the digital strategy to be actioned and ensure FFW continues the amazing work it does for thousands of women across Australia.
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