GoLaadli — Savita Singh

GoLaadli - Empowering Young Women

Go Laadli’s mission is to empower young women to become problem solvers, leaders, and change makers by investing in their education, providing leadership opportunities, and catalyzing changes in social attitudes. In April 2017, they launched The Go Laadli - Lead Like a Girl Challenge. High school girls were asked to write about the problems they thought affected girls and women in India and suggest ways to solve them. From different parts of India--urban and rural, rich and poor--girls took up the challenge, voiced their opinions, identified problems, and proposed solutions. They shared their stories and those of the women and girls they spoke with.

Overview

GoLaadli is an organization aimed at empowering young women to become leaders, problem solvers, and change-makers in their communities. Their founder, Heera Sharma, has several objectives to scale, expand to the US, achieve financial sustainability, and explore the viability of data monetization; the opportunity has turned into a conversation about prioritization and thoughtful foundation building. How can GoLaadli grow in a responsible and strategic way that sets them up for long-term success and a future based on value-driven revenue? This project presents findings and recommendations that the GoLaadli team has built over several months of research and design thinking. The solution is aimed at leveraging and expanding GoLaadli’s strengths while also building the foundation necessary to support the founder’s long-term goals. At the beginning of this project, the founder came to us with a few challenges listed below:

Goals

Growth and Scaling- Optimize the judging process to achieve scale
Financial Sustainability- Case for support for individual donors and corporations. Business model development
Create alternative/ additional incentives for participation

Year

2020 - 2021

Role

Worked on a team of 5 as a Lead Designer. Conducted design research, user interviews, visualization creation, and strategy development.

Tools Used

Sketch, Keynote, Mural, Miro, SurveyMonkey, Zoom, Notion, Storytelling

The Process

Research

Over the course of 2 months, we conducted extensive primary and secondary research in order to develop our understanding of GoLaadli. It included interviews with 4 target groups (GoLaadli Challenge judges, challenge participants, operating directors, and subject matter experts), organizational research (to familiarize ourselves with the functions and flow of the organization), cultural research (to get an understanding of the cultural thoughts and practices that limit or empower GoLaadli as an organization), social impact research (analysis of similar organizations that exist and how they deal with an international target group and finances), analogous research (scan of a variety of industries/companies/social activities/technological or biological processes with similar limitations)

Synthesis

From our interviews, we learned two key insights that helped shape our strategy. First, we learned that all of GoLaadli’s processes are isolated and managed directly be Heera. This type of structure, though successful for the time being, will prevent meaningful scaling because the processes lack resilience and redundancy.

This also prevents Heera from focusing on areas like business strategy and future-proofing, since much of her time is focused presently on managing all parts of the organization’s basic functions. The second critical insight was that the Girl Advisory Board represented the most valuable part of the experience for all of the GoLaadli participants. All of the interviewees we spoke with wished that the engagement lasted longer than its current 6-month lifespan, and all expressed interest in staying involved with the organization longer than they are currently asked to.

Design Strategy

The girls are ready to lead

GoLaadli is an impactful organization with the potential to scale its size and deepen its impact. From our research and designs, we propose a scaffolded approach that is centered around investing in the Girl Advisory Board. We believe that doing so will allow Heera to divest her time and energy from the daily operations of the organization and be able to focus on high-level growth and strategy. Expanding the Girl Advisory Board will also create more meaningful paths for girls to develop enduring and marketable leadership and data collection skills, Done well, the future for GoLaadli will be that of a digital nonprofit that can empower strong youth leaders.

What will it take?

We took a short, medium/long-term view of the strategies that GoLaadli should consider in order to form a resilient bedrock that allows the organization to achieve the objectives that Heera has. We offer immediate next steps that aim to free up capacity and streamline the current judging process. Looking deeper, we also outline and prototype how the Girl Advisory Board can be expanded and strengthened; doing so will create tangible outcomes that serve to improve leadership skills as well as help alleviate some of the administrative burdens that Heera currently faces.

People: Heera, judges | Time: 8-10 hours | Investment: Handwriting-to-text software (free/low cost), editing and refining

The measure of success:

65% reduction in time spent judging, which can pave the way for more judges (who might be more willing to participate with a lower time commitment) and accepting more applications.

People: Heera, judges, mentors, GAB
Time: 7-8 Hours Curating her tasks and workshops for the Certification program (should be a one-time thing- with updates and modifications when needed)

1-2 Hours a week reviewing girl’s tasks

Investment: Time: Learning a new process and application (notion pages), the girls need to become accustomed to using Google drive applications (If that’s the channel of choice).