Winfried Hagenhoff

Pro Bono - AAA Advisors get involved

For many of our AAA Advisors, voluntary work is part of their job - and so, of course, is using their expertise to support social initiatives.

A small contribution is made, for example, by the activity as a juror at startsocial.

Startsocial.de has been advising social initiatives from a wide variety of areas since 2001: social issues such as self-help groups and their networking, cultural promotion, inclusion, equality, political education, democratic participation and much more. The range of these usually volunteer-run associations (or, for example, non-profit GmbHs) is very wide.

"The startsocial competition promotes particularly promising organizations, projects and ideas through the transfer of knowledge between business and civil society. 100 selected social initiatives are supported by a team of voluntary advisors for four months each in their implementation and further development within the framework of scholarships. The focus here is on the following evaluation criteria: Effectiveness, sustainability, efficiency and transferability," startsocial summarizes.

In order to select the 100 initiatives in the annual competition for funding through startsocial, a great deal of effort is required in the evaluation of the ideas or development plans: the volunteer working time invested by all jury members and coaches amounts to an average of almost 15,000 hours per competition round.

That's where experienced consultants come in as jurors. Each juror is presented with at least three usually very different competition entries in order to evaluate them according to defined criteria and to question sticking points and make recommendations in an additional text. This takes a couple of hours per initiative, firstly to get to grips with the objectives and approach of a "founder" community and secondly to get an idea of how an initiative could be helped to set up, achieve growth targets, fundraise and many other aspects.

Of course, each initiative is looked at by several jurors, the feedback to the initiatives should be on a sufficiently broad basis.

And that makes it clear: in order to select the 100 finalists, it takes many, many volunteer jurors who take a day of work once a year - or even more! - to sift through the large number of applications, process them and provide qualified feedback.

The reward for the jurors is the feeling that they have made a small contribution to the sustainable realization of good ideas, and that they have been able to broaden their own horizons through the wide range of topics covered by the competition entries. It is clear that we AAA Advisors will participate in this task again next year.

..............................................  Update 08. Sept. 2022  .........................................

Today we were notified of the 100 winning initiatives that will receive the free consulting support for their initiative, see startsocial.de. And we are happy with all the winners! And we are especially pleased that the two initiatives we judged to be particularly interesting and valuable are among the winners! So our jury work also contributed to the success of these applications.

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The reward of the effort for the society: priceless. Democratic civil society thrives precisely on the diverse voluntary commitment of thousands of initiatives and idea bearers.

By the way, praise goes to the organizers, because the management of this process at startsocial is also an organizational achievement that should not be underestimated!

Therefore at this point our request: get involved too - help help help. All details and background information on the history of startsocial at www.startsocial.de.

 

About the author
Winfried Hagenhoff

Winfried - formerly at Lufthansa, TNS and WPP’s Kantar- is an experienced Senior Executive Advisor. He loves to advise on innovative products and services based on empirical data, and to transform advice into strategy for brands and customer experience. As a former CTO/COO, he is passionate about tech-driven innovations, especially regarding mobility (Auto, Travel, Transport, Sharing), communication, health, public services, and production.

Beside his activities as a Board Member (Verwaltungsrat) in the Swiss based  Bochmann Consulting AG, he has been for some years -and still is- supporting young tech firms and helped social institutions with pro-bono advice.


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