Blessed with 3 CSR partners during our Bizzomate FedEx-day

When you think of FedEx you probably think of the fast delivery of your packages. But, when Bizzomates organizes a FedEx-day, it’s all about solving problems fast. The most  recent FedEx-day resulted in valuable new strategies to solve key challenges of three non-profits within 24 hours. Cindy Custers (LEVANTOgroep), Miriam Gauvin (Stichting Present Dordrecht) and Ivanka van de Wardt (Stichting Creatief Herstel) share their experiences.

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is an important cornerstone for Bizzomate

Bizzomate employees are allowed to spend ten percent of their time on CSR-activities and are volunteers for organizations like LEVANTOgroep, Stichting Present Dordrecht and Stichting Creatief Herstel. Then the Corona-pandemic struck. That made some of these activities impossible to carry out. Therefore Bizzomate had to be creative in finding new ways to take social responsibility.

They decided to organize a FedEx-day for non-profits. A renowned concept for quick problem solving. “We asked three non-profit organizations where we were volunteering to come up with their greatest challenges. By performing a 24-hour design sprint we wanted to provide them with solutions. This allowed us to support these non-profits even during the pandemic. We  helped them by developing valuable new strategies to move their organizations forward. At the same time this was a great opportunity for our consultants to be creative and get out of their comfort zone”, says Marc Gelissen, Pater Familias and CEO at Bizzomate.

Defining the greatest challenges

The Fed-Ex day kicked off by defining the main challenges for the three organizations.The first one is LEVANTOgroep. They provide buddies and volunteers for people with mental vulnerabilities. Their greatest challenge is to attract volunteers with different profiles and from different age groups. More specifically they’re looking for volunteers that still have active careers and they need more variety in the age of their volunteers.

Stichting Present provides people that need help getting a job done within a day with a group of volunteers. They often work with businesses that offer their workforce for a day and find it difficult to get additional funding from businesses that have already contributed to their cause by offering their workforce.

Stichting Creatief Herstel offers a recovery program for people that want to reconnect with society after an intense period of therapy. It supports people to take matters in their own hands again and gain more self-confidence. It can also be used as a reintegration program for people that are recovering from a burnout or depression. The program offers creative therapy, mindfulness and experience sharing. Their greatest challenge is to market their reintegration program to regional businesses.

After defining these challenges, the non-profits were split up in groups and each group performed a 24-hour design sprint to solve these challenges. The next day the participants met up again to discuss the outcome.

The results

Cindy Custers from the LEVANTOgroep was impressed by how the Bizzomate experts were able to find the blind spot in their communication strategy. “We were putting lots of effort into getting new volunteers, but we were targeting people of every age group with exactly the same message. As a result our messaging was too general and did not really appeal to anyone. By working with some of the exercises from the book Sprint: ‘How to solve big problems and test new ideas in just 5 days’ we found out what the main issue was and the Bizzomate experts solved it by developing three different personas for different age groups. With these new insights we are enabled to target them more effectively with the right message.”

Miriam Gauvin is one of the coordinators of Stichting Present Dordrecht – Papendrecht. For her it was particularly striking how the professionals of Bizzomate were able to come up with a great new sales pitch in just 24 hours. Gauvin: “When I left the Bizzomate office after our brainstorm sessions I was a bit concerned. They had been asking so many difficult questions and I wasn’t sure whether they would be able to come up with a workable solution. I was proven wrong. The next day they presented a proposition that allows us to provide regional businesses with a CSR-strategy at an affordable price. They also proposed that experienced volunteers could help out businesses that are working for Stichting Present for a day. This saves us lots of time and effort. Thanks to Bizzomate we now have a proposition that we believe in ourselves, which is indispensable if you want to make a sales pitch work.”

Ivanka van de Wardt, is one of the co-founders of Stichting Creatief Herstel, and participated in FedEx-day: “We need funding to keep our organization going, so we thought our main challenge was to come up with a sales pitch to market our program. However during the brainstorm with Bizzomate they were able to get to the heart of the matter: we felt uncomfortable selling our program, because we started this organization with a completely different goal: helping people recover after a depression or burnout.” After this breakthrough moment we were able to look at our challenges in a completely different way. This resulted in a new proposition based on what we do best: helping people. We’re now turning people we’ve helped out with our program into our ambassadors. The fact that we now have a proposition that matches our values is very valuable for us. We will definitely make this work”.

Importance of properly defining the underlying problem

Gelissen agrees with the valuable insights that a Fed-Ex day provides: “A Fed-Ex day is valuable for all parties involved. It has provided the three non-profits with new strategies and ideas. At the same time it recognizes the importance of finding the right problem to solve even more. With all three organizations the initial problem that had to be solved could only be addressed properly by understanding the real underlying problem first. So this was also very insightful for us. Sometimes we still have the tendency to act too fast and start building an application because we think we know what to build. This Fedex-day stresses once again that getting to the heart of the matter first, is the best way to solve big challenges.”

And the winner is: The CSR-partnership strategy for Stichting Present

The idea of a Fed-Ex day is also that three teams compete against each other. At the end of the day all Bizzomate teams voted for a winner. The team with the new concept for Stichting Present ultimately took the win. Gauvin: We’re really happy with the new sales strategy that Bizzomate has provided us with. We’d really like to leverage this new strategy in our contacts with businesses in this region. Since Bizzomate has also offered us extra support to finetune our sales pitch, we’re sure that we’ll be able to make this work and we’ll secure new funding for our organization.”