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"Facilitation from CauseMic and their exceptional, uncanny ability to address difficult topics.”
Anonymous Survey Respondent
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"Having CauseMic as ‘neutral’ facilitators who understand the pain points was invaluable.”
Anonymous Survey Respondent
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"We got what we needed to get done, because we had CauseMic to move us along in a framework.”
Anonymous Survey Respondent
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"It was good to learn new tools and processes from CauseMic.”
Anonymous Survey Respondent
Year End Donations Fund Running Water
Case Study
Strategic Planning
Empowering individuals to access education, healthcare, and economic opportunities through life-changing bicycles.
The Challenge
World Bicycle Relief (WBR) provides vital mobility in rural regions around the world with their game-changing Buffalo Bicycle. The Buffalo is designed to serve those who have to travel long distances over rugged terrain with heavy cargo.
Their long-term vision “is to inspire all sectors to address the transportation needs for nearly one billion people who need to get to school, work or healthcare.”
As a global social enterprise nonprofit, WBR had expanded its footprint and impact across multiple countries through an entrepreneurial spirit and approach.
However, in so doing, they became challenged to focus efforts on activities with the highest return on investment (ROI). Much of it stemmed from fundraising in seven countries, with each requiring customized core messaging, campaign timing, and technology requirements.
Tasked to serve all markets, the U.S.-based marketing team was getting competing requests, making it very difficult to prioritize the needs and to muster the capacity to meet them.
In short, they found themselves working diligently, but not in a definitive, coordinated way that would achieve their multinational objectives and ultimately unlock substantial growth.
World Bicycle Relief was seeking answers to questions like:
- How can we transition from seven competing marketing plans to one World Bicycle Relief marketing plan?
- How do we prioritize work requests when we have limited capacity?
- How do we identify, evaluate, and maximize the highest ROI opportunities for World Bicycle Relief?
- How do we determine appropriate decision makers for various situations?
Our Solution
To address World Bicycle Relief’s areas of concern, CauseMic:
- Conducted inclusive, structured exercises across multiple offsites to identify what was working well and what wasn’t.
- Invited the teams to solve their greatest challenges in an open, productive environment and determine appropriate decision makers.
- Partnered with WBR’s marketing and philanthropy leaders to develop a one-page strategic plan, project backlog of actionable tasks, and KPI tracker that measured progress and underscored needed course corrections.
- Established workflows, meeting structure, and evaluation tools to leverage WBR’s capacity and to deliver effective communications across all markets.
- Helped their internal team meet desired timelines by providing technical capability and capacity to tackle fundraising backlog items.
The Results
Increased clarity in roles and responsibilities, thereby creating more efficiency in management and staff’s day-to-day operations.
Clear priorities centered on World Bicycle Relief’s strengths, including their major gift portfolio, mass market campaigns, and corporate partner support.
Leveraged best practices and approaches to achieve greater coordination across fundraising markets.
Support functions put in place to bolster World Bicycle Relief’s limited capacity to achieve their priorities.
A few excerpts from attendee surveys that completed the following statement—
What I found most valuable about the leadership workshop was:
Make the most of your top-level meetings.
Adopting an inclusive workshop process helps ensure the best, most feasible notions surface from all your meeting participants. With CauseMic’s expert, facilitated structure, you’re well on your way to a successful, solution-oriented gathering.
