Homeless Entrepreneur is a non-profit organisation that focuses on empowering people out of poverty and reintegrating them into society. They were looking to align every contributor and take tangible steps to maximise their impact.
Their Challenge
Homeless Entrepreneur's mission is to end homelessness. In its pursuit of this, they have many contributors who believe in and support the organisation. The main challenge was how to align the core team with all the student interns, professional volunteers, consultants, and company sponsors/partners, so they could scale their operations and maximise impact.
Their Goal
Build a robust, scalable approach to operations.
Our Solution
We started by helping the core team and leadership take a step back and map out everything currently requiring all their energy. We identified one of the biggest pain points as the onboarding of the constant turnover of interns who are only there to work for a summer. There was a constant drain on resources because it took four weeks to get the interns fully up and running, aligned on goals, and procedures so they could fulfill their roles in social networking, acquiring supporters, and securing donations. They had to constantly ask questions and re-board.
We ran workshops with all stakeholders, established the critical information they needed, and then tested it with the interns for feedback.
In just a few short iterations, we were able to get the interns up and running by disseminating key knowledge from the leadership team into an efficient bite-size onboarding program.
We then built a clear multi-phase strategy going forward to address the various other groups of contributors, streamline their onboarding, and dramatically increase impact.
Phases and Key Results
Interns (Phase 1)
Objective: To onboard interns as fast as possible and have them return.
Key Results (metrics):
- Interns onboarded
- Onboarding duration
- Network contacts made
- Intern hours worked
- Fundraising gained
Volunteers (Phase 2)
Objective: To onboard volunteers as fast as possible and retain them.
Key Results (metrics):
-
Homeless beneficiaries supported
-
Volunteer hours worked
-
Deliverables completed
Homeless (Phase 3)
Objective: To onboard and outboard the homeless as fast as possible.
Key Results (metrics):
- Helpline interactions
- Voices created and shared
- Help success stories
Partners (Phase 4)
Objective: To onboard partners as fast as possible and retain them.
Key Results (metrics):
- Economic donations
- Probono hours worked
- Network intros made
The Result
Over the course of Phase 1, lasting 4 months, Homeless Entrepreneur has seen the following results:
- Reduced onboarding - 75% reduction in staff onboarding time.
- Leadership time-saving - Freed up 30 hrs/month for the President to focus on business development.
- Human Resources: The Personnel Manager now has more time to address the onboarding of other personnel over the next four months in phases 2-4.
- Success Metrics: The Impact Manager now has the resources to tangibly measure the impact of the new approach to operations, with new software integration and metrics to be set for review over the next four months.
