Take a group of UCL students who’ve never met before, put them into a totally new situation for a week – what can they achieve? Quite a lot, as it happens.
Over the course of five very intense days in June, seven teams of UCL students took part in our first ever UCL Charity Consultancy Challenge. Their task – to help our community partners find solutions to some real-life business problems they were facing. Their projects included policy work, data analysis, volunteer recruitment strategies, developing new products and campaigns, training development and more.
On Monday the students attended training workshops and got to grips with the project briefs. They then had three days to develop a set of workable solutions to the problems they’d been set. The teams were drawn from all of UCL’s faculties, and included postgrads and undergrads, UK and international students. They started out as strangers, though things didn’t stay that way for long - they had to supercharge the team building process as well as getting on with their consultancy projects.
By Friday morning, they presented back their findings … and then in the afternoon, everyone came back together again to share what they’d discovered. This is where the ‘challenge’ part came to the fore – the group judged to have delivered the best project won £1000 for their host charity to help put their work into action.
The judges had a really difficult time coming to a decision, but ultimately plumped for the group working with Starfish Greathearts, a charity that supports orphaned and vulnerable children in communities affected by HIV and poverty in South Africa. The student consultants had worked on a horizon scanning project identifying ways the charity needed to respond to changes in social media, marketing and digital fundraising.
Impact
Every student who took part stated they’d improved their skills as part of the Consultancy Challenge. The most frequently developed skills were Team Work (97%), Consultancy (76%), Problem Solving (66%) and Project Management Skills (66%).
In addition, 79% of students said they’d made new friends, 79% said they’d learned about charities and not-for-profits, and 79% said they’d learned about how charities and universities can share knowledge.
Collectively, the students gave around 1100 hours of consultancy work to the community partners. But how valuable was this work? We conducted follow up interviews with the community partners a month after the Challenge. They all told us that:
- The Consultancy Challenge met or exceeded expectations
- They are already using the outcomes of the students’ consultancy work in the planning, development and delivery of their services.
- They’d take part in the Consultancy Challenge again.
What students and community organisations said about the Consultancy Challenge
It was a great pleasure to spend the week with the students. They were fully engaged in the task and came up with some great solutions. We are looking forward to implementing the suggestions across the network and reaching more supporters, enabling us to care for more children thanks to their work! Starfish CEO Elinor Middleton.
This week gave us, Empathy Action, the perfect platform to build new connections, new believers in Empathy and new ambassadors for our organisation. Developing three new digital campaigns isn’t easy but we achieved in creating three blueprints which will shape our future digital strategy. Cameron Wenham, Empathy Action.
It was a joy to meet and work alongside people from different degrees and study levels. The feeling of achieving a goal where each team member contributed was terrific. Peng Peng Chen, UCL BSc Geography. (read more)
I was among the team members nominated to present our groups’ findings at the Charity Consultancy Challenge. Despite being generally comfortable during public speaking, I felt some nerves since I wanted to do justice to the hard work of the team. That said, the presentation went well and I was thrilled that the judges saw the merits of our work. Jerome Boyd, UCL MSc Global Governance & Ethics (read more)
It gave me good insight into the area of consulting and made me realise that it is a field I want to work in in the future... our group got a taste of what it would be like to work as a consultant in the real world. It felt as though we had stopped being students for a week! Mya Patel, UCL BSc Human Sciences (read more)
The week ended leaving me incredibly inspired by many of my fellow UCL students. I learned powerful lessons from those I worked and conversed with. All the student volunteers were diverse in terms of age, gender, knowledge, and perspectives. I was inspired by their enthusiasm, brilliance, compassion, determination as well as professionalism regardless their background. Deborah Leem, UCL Digital Humanities PhD (read more)
Find out more
To find out more about the UCL Charity Consultancy Challenge, contact the Volunteering Service
UCL Charity Consultancy Challenge is a collaboration between Students’ Union UCL’s Volunteering Service and UCL Careers, and funded by the Higher Education Innovation Fund.