Every good client relationship begins with an assessment. Many organizations have methodologies for doing assessments and reporting back, but at EvolvED, we do not buy into conventional ways of collecting data. Instead, we believe in spending a significant amount of our time getting to understand our clients and what they are truly trying to accomplish. We ask the questions that need to be asked, and we will even bring up the ones that other people are not asking.
Forget death by PowerPoint; we will conduct the assessment by leaving the office behind to focus on the questions at hand. This could be done while meeting for coffee, drinks, or even a walk. This assessment helps us ask the tough questions, identify the gaps, then customize our approach. And we do this fast.
EvolvED also strives to live by a few basic principles. These core commitments allow us to work successfully in innovative and entrepreneurial environments by encouraging us to be forever flexible and always curious.
Our Work is divided between the sides of the Periodic Table of SEE. We focus on delivering new, specific, measurable and, of course, customized solutions to the challenges that the social impact field faces on a daily basis. We do this by using the assessment and strategic consulting tools that we have built over the years. We are storytellers and creators, we are researchers and finance, and we combine the right side of the brain with the left side of the brain in everything we do. If we didn’t, nothing would evolve.
During all of our engagements, we are committed to building out competencies that will improve our core product, our SEE table. Mixed together with the right elements, we believe that we can always bring the organizations we work with together to continue in the path they describe when they answer our two “simple” questions.Here are some of our offerings and current work; we often create new services while working closely with our clients because the preliminary nature of the project is television production.
We are working with the corporate and educational industry to create the most relevant competencies for our field. In this area, our vision is to pursue our mission through strategic public/private partnerships with selected Higher Education Institutions in co-creating competency-based blended eLearning experiences on a global scale. Many institutions have started or plan to create new learnings that will guide their students to save both time and money. EvolvED is here to work with institutions and professional organizations to help learners in the field of social entrepreneurship to assure success as they start to plan and create the new endeavors. This way students can master these important skills at their own pace.
Sometimes taking a good long look is all an organization needs to get to the next level. We have built our careers on assessing the situation. We conduct our assessments by doing a “quick look” focused on the “Long View.” We have proven methodologies that work through the use of interviews and analysis of available data. In the end, we provide leaders with a greatly enhanced view of their organization, its strengths and weaknesses, an evaluation of its strategy, and high-level threats and opportunities in the value chain where they thrive.
Everyone talks about “organization change,” but we combine it with an action plan. When doing strategic work with our client organizations, we start by defining the impact and outcomes that they want to achieve. We next combine the needs of every level of an organization by understanding its people, technology and history. Deliverables include a complete strategy, leadership buy-in, a plan to roll out the strategy to the organization. We also include a “learning agenda” and “communications craze” for the rest of the organization so that everyone can get behind the work, not just the top tier. Everyone matters and we know it, we build our strategies that way.
Social media proliferation, online collaboration demands and the impact of the Millennials and Generation Z have more than raised the bar for higher education; they’ve moved it into another dimension. Young people also care a heck of a lot about being the change they want to see in the world.
The client, North Carolina Association for Independent Schools (NCAIS), wanted to create a “virtual environment” for 80 members within its large independent school system.
What would have been a simple online portal became so much more after EvolvED encouraged the client to think more like an entrepreneur. Together, we worked to create an entire virtual community and a Master Teacher Academy. We provided the teachers of NCAIS with the means to learn an abundance of technical and subjective skills. We expanded our resources by partnering with industry leaders to develop and provide complementary online tools. As a result, more than 50 schools enrolled in the Academy, and 18 teachers participated in training.
Today, NCAIS’s Master Teacher Academy is held up as a model and NCAIS esteemed as a market leader in the Independent School Space because of it. Usage grows every month.
This evolving industry helps connect the dots between the place where we live and those who are committed to generating substantial yet sustainable financial results alongside vitally important social and environmental benefits. Everyone on the EvolvED team has been doing this kind of work for some time; the industry is now mature enough to have a name.
A 501(c)(3) committed to developing business for struggling individuals and communities was looking to scale. It had major success in the state of New Jersey, but was looking to expand.
Like most ambitious and successful nonprofits, it was impossible for the founders to stop and pull together all of their work products. The EvolvED team worked with the cofounders and the entire staff of this amazing organization to bring clarity to what they were doing and build a product that could be “replicated” beyond one state.
The replication initiative brought the Rising Tide model to Chicago as the first of many future “Rising Tide Cities.`` Today, thanks to EvolvED, they are also a part of the Aspen Institute of Urban Cities pilot program in Washington, DC.
At the heart of our healthcare system is the complex and game changing Pharma industry. Despite the misconception that Big Pharma is profit driven, EvolvED works with the pioneers in the field who focus on people who have major health issues improve their quality of life.
A major Pharma was trying to organize their Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs) around the promotion of the off-label use of one of the most successful drugs in the company’s history. By exploring new ways to use this Mega-brand, many more lives would be saved, and caregivers would also be given relief. However, multiple stakeholders needed to come together and find a common ground around the World.
EvolvED created the first ever Internally branded Internet KOL site for this Pharma and its Mega-Brand. As a result, thousands of physicians around the world were educated to use this brand for multiple diagnosis. A robust visual was created to represent the current state clearly and dynamically, and the first ever cross-communication platform for KOLs was formed.
That prototype became THE model for broader use across future brands. This success was the benchmark of the KOL Communique across the global market. Today, KOLs have scalable, documented, platforms informed by current best practices. Most importantly, the Pharma built a desire and excitement amongst the KOLs to use an iterative communication vehicle.
Financial Services are ruled by data. Data science jobs can take twice as long to fill than the national benchmark average and the competition for talent is growing more fierce. In today’s environment college degrees by themselves, do not adequately prepare someone to function in these roles. Competition for this talent is increasingly intense, especially in the financial sector. We know that many organizations need assistance in properly preparing existing and potential talent with the competencies they need to stay at the leading edge of “big data”. Big data will drive Financial Services in the years ahead.
A multi-billion dollar financial institution needed help deepening and broadening its data science and machine learning talent to maintain and grow its leadership position in financial services. EvolvED was part of a team that is finding innovative ways to meet this challenge. We did this by predicting the future of high-tech needs for the business and financial services industry, and by providing a suggested solution that will match the new talent with the competencies required to do the important work.
Though finding, recruiting, onboarding, developing, and retaining this talent has become increasingly complex, our team developed a competency roadmap that will serve as a baseline for finding talent of this type. The periodic table of data science and machine learning will assist in bridging the gaps between current and future competencies to move the business to the next level.
Upon completion of the periodic table, the team will create a roadmap to standardize the assessment of internal and external job candidates. In the ensuing months, by using this methodology, the belief is that time and money can be saved; the talent acquisition process will more efficient AND will this new way of finding and onboarding talent will be better aligned with the needs of this ever-evolving industry.