Have you ever volunteered and felt that cold sweat and fear of approaching strangers when you were asked to fundraise for a good cause? Well, I am certainly one of those people. However, I love the Sauder Africa Initiative and fundraising is a very important part to achieve our ultimate goal: help Kenyan youth to set up their own businesses and get out of poverty.
Based all on my great experiences with the d.studio, I came up with an idea to organize a “design thinking & creativity” session for our 2011 Team on corporate fundraising. I invited my two great friends, design thinkers themselves, Peder Sande (UBC B-com student) and Florin Gheorghe (UBC engineering student) to help me get the ideas flowing.
It was not easy at all at 6 pm in the evening on a beautiful sunny day when most of the people had drinks with their friends or walked on the beach. But, with the help of my friends, colorful bunch of posted notes and enthusiasm, we rolled up our sleeves. We divided the team into 2 groups and started with a cow brainstorming exercise (basically, how many businesses can you create using a cow) to get everyone the touch and feel for the “big game”. Big game meant lots of crazy and crazier ideas, it was quantity over quality race. We did get some unbelievable corporate fundraising proposals. Just to give you an idea: kidnap a CEO of a company, then save him/her and the person will be so grateful that the company will donate (we are going to have the ransom as well, of course – all troubles solved). Please, do not try this ever!
No need to tell you that the two teams went to walk a very different path. However, after two hours of the exercise, we came up with a pretty good corporate fundraising event which was a result of combination of three small ideas. It needs some fine-tuning but I will present it to you in future blogs. But I can tell you one thing: design & business can create some pretty amazing projects when combined!
Martina — thanks for sharing this experience. Also at some point it would be good to hear more about the Sauder Africa Initiative generally. I blogged on ARC but we could use on on SAI.