Mercy Corps
Defining the E-Voucher Market between Humanitarians and the Private Sector
Role: Innovation Consultant/Account Manager/Project Lead/Workshop Producer/Workshop Manager for ORGE Innovation
Innovation Consultants:
Workshop Producer and Manager:
Graphic Designer:
Knowledge Brokers:
Jeff Wishnie, Alisa Oyler, Vincent Trousseau, Jude Powell, Alexa Swift
Clients:
Mercy Corps is a global agency that delivers aid to those critically in need and fosters resilience in the world's toughest environments. Founded in 1979 with headquarters in North America and Europe, it has provided more than US$1.95 billion in aid that has reached 16.7 million people in over 40 countries.
ORGE Innovation Consulting is a design-led innovation consultancy that provides organizations structured methods to help them stay innovative. ORGE Innovation offers services in the areas of Knowledge Brokering, Open Innovation Consortium, Design Strategies, Project Framing, Innovation Capacity Building, and Leadership Mentoring.
ORGE Innovation Consulting worked with Mercy Corps to create a one-day workshop as part of their Mastercard-sponsored ELAN event held in London, with participants including private sector groups such as Mastercard, sQuid, and Noble House and humanitarian agencies like the World Food Program, Oxfam, and Action Against Hunger (ACF) Spain. The goals of the workshop were to analyze existing e-voucher features and identify the market case for continuing to develop e-voucher products used in humanitarian aid to deliver goods and services to people in the hardest to reach and most needed areas such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, Syria, and Sierra Leone.
Open Innovation Consortium
ORGE worked closely with Mercy Corps to put together a team of in-house facilitators for the workshop, as well as identify and group the different participant types which are central to ORGE's knowledge brokering process.
Project Framing
Although the workshop was only one step within the long process of developing the market for e-vouchers, a main challenge was to identify the best starting point from which all participants could view and contribute their knowledge to framing the subject itself.
Knowledge Brokering
Apart from simply transferring common organizational knowledge from brain to paper, different incentives and viewpoints were brought to the fore and applied to create a richer and more dynamic view of e-voucher parts.
Design Strategies
Design strategies were used to visually guide participants to map, describe, and hone different types of information in order to unpack the existing voucher and e-voucher processes.
Analysis
The results of the workshop were analyzed and visual infographics were created to support a report that will be released by Mercy Corps and distributed to the attending participants.
Workshop Structure
Activities Mapping
The voucher process including planning, use, and post-use was outlined on three levels of detail to give a clearly structured linear progression and help facilitators identify insights between the differences and similarities.
Activity-Feature Association
Features were populated from the outlined activities, and comprised the first step in mapping the more important e-voucher parts that would be analyzed in the rest of the workshop.
Feature Deconstruction
Participants were asked to simply describe the features and their functions, and categorize the subsequent costs and benefits of having those features as part of a fully-formed e-voucher product.
Stakeholder Mapping
Known stakeholders were identified within the context of the different activities associated with the e-voucher process, and more were discovered through the direct, indirect, and structural categorization attached to each activity.
Stakeholder Incentives Analysis
The incentives to be a part of the e-voucher system, barriers to entry, and opportunities for inclusion were explored, and first-hand input from the stakeholders in attendance was incorporated into the framework to enhance understanding of each participant's point of view.
Feature Ranking
Since a goal of the workshop was to identify the key features for e-voucher products, the features chosen and analyzed were prioritized according to how well they satisfied the needs of their associated activities and stakeholders, and sparked a larger conversation about how important they were to develop for the e-voucher market.
Vocabulary Definition
One problem the Mercy Corps team faced was the lack of a universal vocabulary concerning e-vouchers, so a separate activity centered around defining key concepts was used throughout the workshop.
Big Picture Compilation
The Big Picture Compilation was designed as a large process map in which the individual frameworks used in the workshop acted as keys leading to more information concerning the voucher activities and their connected features and stakeholders.
Role-Specific Tasks
Project Leader and Account Manager
In this role I shared client-facing tasks with my ORGE co-founder, Carlos Teixeira, which included strategy meetings directly with the client, framing of the issues to be addressed through the workshops, alignment of workshop goals and identifications of bottlenecks and challenges, etc. In addition to this, my role included working directly with our graphic designer Gertrud to turn the ideas into a functioning workshop, as well as handling other logistics like training of facilitators, analyzing the event space, etc. I was also the ORGE representative to fly to London to meet with and do a run-through with the clients, as well as manage the workshop in conjunction with the clients on the event day.
Workshop Production
My responsibilities with regards to workshop production encompassed all aspects of delivering the workshop, including facilitator training, hiring a graphic designer, scheduling tasks and milestones, remotely looking at the event space and furniture needed, designing and producing the workshop materials, briefing the clients on the workshop flow, and going to London to deliver the workshop itself.
Workshop Design
The workshop design and flow were created by Carlos and myself working closely with the Mercy Corps clients to ensure that the aims of the event were suitably reflected in the workshop itself.
Workshop Materials Creation
The workshop materials were designed by Carlos, Gertrud, and myself. Gertrud was our graphic designer hired for this project to turn the ideas for the frameworks into Adobe InDesign creations.
Knowledge Brokering and Workshop Management
The management of the workshop was coordinated by the clients and myself, and the three of us acted as knowledge brokers to ensure that participants had help where needed, explored concepts to the utmost of their ability, and stayed on schedule.
Workshop Facilitator Training
Workshop facilitators were identified through Mercy Corp's network of skilled workshop facilitators according to a personality profile outlined by me. Facilitators were then trained in the ORGE knowledge brokering methodology and in the workshop itself.