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3 Steps to Help You Scale Your School Initiative
People tell you to make your initiative "go global" - but how exactly do you achieve that?
Porte Global
October 18, 2024
“Concert for Peace” organized by our student’s organization, Thrive Refuge. Thrive invited 30+ refugee families from the Immigration Services Society of Canada to attend the concert.
When building a project, it’s common advice from mentors to aim high and strive for a global initiative.
Three Types of Initiatives
School Initiative 🌱
- Your organization was founded at your school. (ex: School Environmental Club, Debate Team, or Sports)
- Your initiatives only happen & affect people at school. (ex: recurring fundraisers at lunch, organizing assemblies)
- Majority of your team/stakeholders are members of your school community. (ex: team members are all classmates, club advisors are your teachers)
Local Initiative 🌿
- Your organization was launched outside of school, or you introduced a new initiative that affects people in your local community
- Activities take place in your local community (ex: organizing volunteers for the community centre, external sports equipment fundraising, working with a local business) and/or your school
- People involved outside of your school. (ex: team members are from across the city, your org affects seniors @ different senior homes across the city)
National/Global Initiative 🌲
- Your organization engages individuals across your city, country and/or across the world
- Activities of your organization affects people outside of your state/province. (Ex: you run a tutoring organization which affects students across the U.S and Canada with mentors from across the globe)
- Team members span across the nation/globally. Your organization has also received recognition from national or global media sources. (Ex: interviews with Global News, invites to speak at global conferences, working with businesses abroad)
There’s a big jump between the last two initiative types.
Here are 3 steps you should take to help you come up with ways to go from local to a national/global scale.
Table of Contents
#1: Specify your target audience
The biggest mistake students make is beginning with a goal that is too broad. It certainly isn’t a fault to be genuinely passionate about comprehensively addressing a large issue.
Your first step should be to evaluate the goals of your organization and see if it is specific enough.
Scaling becomes easier if your cause is specific.
Having too big of a goal:
❌Makes your project unfocused
❌Puts you into more competition with other student initiatives
❌Makes it difficult for stakeholders such as national or global institutions to advocate for you
Let’s consider this mission statement drafted from one of our previous students.
“My organization aims to share the stories of seniors and support them by organizing cohorts of students to volunteer weekly at my local senior home.”
Key Questions:
What does “support” look like?
What specific pain point are you addressing?
Are you offering emotional support, socialization, or physical help?
After reading this mission statement, it’s very difficult to picture the exact impact you are trying to achieve. In turn, you will find yourself even more confused on what tangible actions you can take to grow big.
The following table is way to help you specify your target audience.
Intended Target Audience | What are their pain points? | What is my background and what could I do specifically to help? |
|---|---|---|
Seniors | - physical issues; hard for them to move in the senior home and transport around the city - memory loss; difficult for many to remember specific details and conversations - loneliness & alienation, especially seniors with family members who have already passed - etc. | - English is my favorite subject and I’ve always liked writing stories - Reason why I care: growing up I helped my grandparents a lot — I notice how I was sometimes frustrated that they forgot details of our conversations - Want to be physically present for other seniors who may not be able to see their grandchildren/family regularly |
Understanding and visualizing your target audiences specific pain points is a great way for you to refine your organization goal.
Based on the student’s background, they decided that focusing on seniors’ memory loss would be a better target audience.
#2: Visualize the tangible, quantifiable impact on your target audience.
Typically, students’ first instinct when coming up with initiatives is to spread awareness about a certain issue and achieve that through volunteering opportunities.
The problem with this approach is:
❌Everyone is spreading awareness about an issue to some degree
❌Awareness is hard to quantify and simply spreading education materials may only exist for the short term.
A good exercise is to put yourself in the shoes of your target audience and try to think of meaningful activities or even physical exercises that could make impact in the long term.
Our new mission statement:
“My organization aims to help seniors struggling with memory loss and who cannot remember important details about their lives & relationships. We want to support them by organizing cohorts of students to volunteer weekly at my local senior home.”
Let’s try to visualize what will happen at these weekly volunteering sessions. What physical aspects could you incorporate to help seniors with memory loss?
Our student’s brainstorm:
- Researching a new technology that helps with memory and trying to increase access to that technology to our seniors
- Some type of recurring workshop or repeated exercise so seniors can exercise their memory better
- Finding a way to record important notes and memories so seniors can refer to something outside of their brains
Focus on something that creates an impact on your target audience that can still exist even after your organization.
Our student really liked the idea of helping seniors record memories and preserving them in a meaningful way.
New tangible impacts of their organization:
- Students will volunteer at the senior home bi-weekly to speak with seniors and do socializing activities together
- At the end of each session, students will help seniors write a memoir/journal entry of what they enjoyed that week
- After every 3 months, seniors will receive a hand-crafted memory book/story book containing all of their journal entries. Student volunteers will creatively draw illustrations and add photos to these books.
Why this impact works long term:
Seniors can refer to these storybooks whenever they need, even when the volunteers aren’t there
Effectively solving the specific pain point of memory loss
#3: Replicating your system to other communities
Through this exercise, we’ve defined a specific pain point of a target audience and a tangible product.
Our next steps are just to replicate this volunteering system & storybook production for more communities nationally and globally.
Next Steps
- Researching different senior homes in your city, across the country and internationally who support seniors with memory problems. Pitch your structure.
- Outreaching to existing student volunteering initiatives who work with seniors and who could easily integrate the storybook structure into their weekly activities
- Identifying local book publishers who’ve shown interest in your target audience beforehand - outreaching & connecting these publishers to existing student volunteers
From there, the pathway to sharing your work at a national conference or partnering with national institutions becomes more feasible.
Building a global initiative takes thoughtful planning and clear objectives. By specifying your target audience, creating tangible impacts, and aligning with stakeholders, you can much more easily come up with an action plan for scale.
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