Document Actions
Investee Reflections
Investee Reflections
Below are reflections from Executive Directors of Investees we have worked with. They provide personal insights into the benefits of working with SVP.
Metrocenter YMCA – Jennifer Parker, Executive Director
“Our relationship with SVP has been an energizing learning experience. Most significantly, we are far more deliberate about assessing our organizational capacity and setting goals for developing capacity, and we are increasing our ability to articulate measurable goals and systematically assess our progress in achieving these goals.
SVP’s Organizational Capacity Assessment tool brings a high level of precision to evaluating the current level of our organizational capacity. Our Lead Partner, Ron Tanemura, brings an outside perspective, keen analysis and “metrics.” This work has made an immediate and ongoing impact on our individual and collective understanding of our dreams for the organization and our work. The process gave us a common language to discuss issues that had previously seemed like vague concerns.
SVP’s investment is unlike anything our organization has experienced. And Metrocenter will have more internal strength to develop, support and disseminate innovative programs that transform the lives of young people who need our care."
Childcare Resources – Nina Auerbach, Executive Director
“The project with the biggest impact thus far involved the development of a new database for CCR’s Homeless Child Care Program. Services for this program involve staff from both our Homeless Child Care team (who find child care for the families) and staff from our Provider Services team (who work with the providers to make sure they have the support needed to adequately serve the children). Staff had been using an old database that we “inherited” from the King County Child Care Program and were spending an inordinate amount of time working around this antiquated data base. Fortunately, SVP was able to secure the help of David Habib (SVP Partner ’00), a masterful engineer of databases, who had already helped CCR on one other occasion.
A team of six CCR staff (program, financial and MIS) met with David on a weekly basis for several months to develop the schema of the database. The program was tested in January 2006 and has been in full operation since February, 2006. All program staff who use this data base report that it has significantly reduced their work load and has resulted in far fewer billing errors because of the automated nature of the billing system. It has cut the time of the staff person who was preparing these billings on a monthly basis from one full day to one hour! Finally, we have a data base that allows the unique work flow required by our work environment to move along well, allowing our staff’s primary attentions to be focused where they belong….on homeless families and children.”
Climate Solutions – Paul Horton, Executive Director
“The most significant change to Climate Solutions came out of our recently completed organizational branding effort led by SVP partner Deb Hagen. Our primary purpose in initiating the effort was to improve our marketing and communications efforts. Deb began by conducting a brief audit of our various print and electronic outreach platforms. In the audit we observed inconsistent messaging and story telling practices that reduced our effectiveness with our target audiences. Deb helped us develop a new Message Matrix in order to create messaging discipline within our individual programs and across the organization.
Deb also helped us recognize the lack of brand unity among our three flagship programs and between the programs and the organization itself. We kept our programs fragmented in order to protect the fragile coalitions we have carefully cultivated over the last seven or eight years. While Deb was not the deciding factor in the positive outcome of our effort to address this challenge, she laid out a very compelling case for the need to develop a brand hierarchy that could overcome the fragmentation while providing us a framework in which to comfortably take the issue on as a group.
We are more aware now than ever that if Climate Solutions is to continue to play a strategic role in shaping the public debate around and response to the climate crisis, we need to have a clear sense of the unique attributes we bring to the party and a coordinated and disciplined approach to telling our story. Fortunately, our branding effort happened to coincide with an effort to update and recalibrate our existing strategic organizational workplan (an effort supported by SVP partner/volunteers Rogers Weed and Steve Sundquist). A combination of Deb’s skilled facilitation and several half-day branding sessions over a period of months created an environment where critical introspection about our unique value proposition could take place, thus making for a more robust and informed planning process.”
