The Challenge
The Minerva Foundation for BC Women is a non-profit charitable organization that delivers a range of unique programs to help women develop their leadership capacity and find meaningful work. They needed a review of their processes and system requirements to help them choose a stakeholder management solution that aligned with their goals. Minerva engaged us as an objective facilitator to help them select the right solution for their needs.
The Objectives
- Needs Assessment: Our team worked with Minerva to create detailed maps for mission-critical processes including fundraising, donor management, programming and event facilitation. We accomplished this by interviewing employees and managers, reviewing documentation and observing key processes. The maps included all steps in the process, plus the manual data manipulation and documentation required to ensure the new system’s compatibility with existing processes.
- Prioritizing Business Requirements: We translated the needs of the organization into functional requirements and worked with Minerva stakeholders to prioritize the structure of their new system. These requirements were then separated into several classifications–mandatory, important, non-essential, future, or unnecessary–forming the basis for evaluation of potential vendors.
- Facilitating System Vendor Selection: After gaining a thorough understanding of Minerva’s processes and conducting a complete market scan of potential solutions, we identified our top list of best-practice solutions to improve efficiency and service delivery. We developed demo scripts for potential vendors to run through to help Minerva evaluate each vendor against their specific process requirements. We also provided an evaluation framework to further narrow down the list and help Minerva find the perfect fit.
The Results
Thanks to our work on this project, Minerva was able to select the right stakeholder management system to meet their needs, with agreement from all involved parties. They were left with the framework and tools they needed to make the vendor selection process seamless.