Here at Nimbl Consulting one of our principles is to be a #forceforgood in our communities. We want to share some mahi with you, our first pro-bono partnership in what will hopefully be a long list of partnerships and work with organisations trying to make a real impact across Aotearoa, New Zealand.
The Challenge and Opportunity
The Nest Collective is a registered charity that works alongside social workers and other community partners to provide free packs of baby and children’s essentials for whānau in need. Their vision is that:
"all New Zealand babies are given a great start in life to enable them to flourish"
As a charity, the balancing of resourcing, inventory, financials, volunteers etc. is incredibly complex and getting this balance right can be make or break. Our opportunity to support The Nest Collective was to help them understand their current state, processes, systems, stakeholders, and touch points, in order to support decision making for future growth.
But we didn't just want to help The Nest Collective understand current state, we also wanted to make some recommendations for how they might move forward, providing efficiencies in processes, using systems to reduce double handling, and reducing any risks to the running of the charity.
Our Mahi (work)
The Nimbl team had a couple of initial conversations with members of the board and management team to understand the scope of the work and what would be of most value to them.
Once we understood the scope, we developed an online session we could run using a virtual collaboration in which we had already prepared a Service Blueprint template to work through.
Then when we had developed the blueprint, we shared the link with members joining the session to look at prior to the workshop and add any feedback or comments to help set the scene. This helped us to maximize the time during the workshops to focus on the high value areas.
We ran the workshop using the Service Blueprint template and gradually filled in the different sections of their end-to-end process, from awareness and donations, to creating the packs and the distribution of packs to whānau in need. Throughout the session, attendees called out pain points they were aware of but also uncovered some of the pain points that people weren't aware of that we could identify as opportunities for improvement.
Following the workshop, the Nimbl team came back together to reflect on the feedback, the journey map we had developed and what recommendations could be made. Some desk-based research was completed to identify potential back-end systems to improve efficiencies in the process.
Outcomes
Through our workshop and post-workshop reflections we identified 7 themes. Across these themes we called out areas that had opportunities for improvement.
The themes we identified were:
Inventory
Orders
Communications
Volunteers
Information Gathering
Partnerships
Grants
Across these themes we developed 19 recommendations, of varying complexity, to implement and add value. One recommendation was called out as higher priority and an approach to wrap more process around this was teased out to ensure The Nest Collective could appropriately solve that challenge.
We presented The Nest team with their Service Blueprint and the list of themes and recommendations to help them to move forward and make decisions that enable their growth.
A Force for Good
We’re really proud of this mahi and the partnership with such a great group of people giving everything to make a difference in Aotearoa. If you don't know about The Nest Collective, have a read of their website.
Again, this is just the start of our journey to be a #forceforgood so please, get in touch if you know of any people or organisations out there that might need some support to make a bigger impact with their mahi. Or get in touch if you just want to kōrero about what we do and why.
Visit us online at www.nimblconsulting.com or email us at [email protected]