Impact Day 2013

By Tunde Wey
July 25, 2013

Once a year, on a day dubbed IMPACT Day, Deloitte—the global business services and consulting agency—focuses its impressive resources and talents on volunteering in the community. Deloitte’s 45,000 strong workforce volunteer in the community planting, painting, teaching, tutoring and serving. IMPACT Day is in its 14^th year and Deloitte’s office in Detroit did a little something different this year.
 
Around 50 nonprofit leaders gathered in Deloitte’s Detroit office in the Renaissance Center. With little distractions but clear sky and an impressive view—idyllic miniature islands and shrunken skyscrapers—nonprofit leaders from organizations working on issues as diverse as housing and family services to supporting the visually impaired teamed up with Deloitte professionals to explore "Social Impact Through the Eyes of Gen Y."
 
The Detroit team at Deloitte, including Joseph Gaglio and Neil Tambe, walked the nonprofit leaders through a design thinking session, presenting them with three social impact trends being pioneered by Generation Y, people born between the start of the 1980’s and the 2000’s. The three social impact focus areas were Technology, Talent and Business Models, the premise of the day being that nonprofits should begin examining ways to leverage technology, hire and retain talent (the Gen Y variety of course), and investigate new business models to meet their mission.
 
Around technology, the trends presented to the nonprofit leaders were cloud computing and data analysis. Concerning Business Models, crowd funding and social entrepreneurship were the identifiable trends, while the trends discussed for Talent were so-called “talent in the cloud” and learning by doing.
 
Basically, the day called for progressive thinking from organizations eager to learn but justifiably wary of capricious trends.
 
At the beginning of the day, the nonprofit leaders were divided into five teams, each tasked with developing a winning idea around one of the three focus areas of Technology, Talent and Business. At the end of the day, participants voted on the best idea.
 
The thinking in the room was marked by some tension between more traditional (and tested) practices and the Gen Y approach of ideation, prototyping and rapid testing. Ultimately there was consensus that the way forward for nonprofits was embracing newer technology and thinking.
 
The winning idea was a mutual fund-style online donation platform that lets users donate their money to various nonprofits working on a single issue. Almost like a social good portfolio with the user as the portfolio manager weighing risk and return, and the individual nonprofits as the investments vying to outperform expectations. Pretty forward thinking.