Sosped x Solita
There can be times when people are between projects in consulting companies, and they don’t have full-time project allocation. Free time from projects is usually used for competence development or internal development work in the company. When it comes to competence development, we think that every project teaches valuable lessons for everybody, even for experienced employees. That is why pro bono projects are a great opportunity for meaningful and instructive work between projects. Pro bono collaboration provides value for all: for the company and the partner organisation.
I am going to tell you a bit about our recently finished pro bono project that creates social impact. Our client Sosped Foundation (Sosped) is a non-governmental foundation that has a mission to support people by enhancing their overall well-being and recovery from different addictions through social interactions and peer support. Sosped’s framework stems from social pedagogy and its foundational principle of hope. With social pedagogical actions, it is possible to encourage people to find hope in themselves and therefore they can also find faith in the possibilities to survive different challenges in life. Sosped operates nationwide in Finland and actively seeks to collaborate nationally and internationally with similar organisations.
Sosped Foundation owns Sosped Center which is dedicated to solving complex societal issues by measuring and evaluating their impact on different groups of society. For instance, the economic value of a certain phenomenon can have dozens of impact chains. With impact evaluation, these economic values can be examined regarding different people in chosen groups. Impact evaluation tools can measure impact not only for the people in despair but also for their loved ones, community and the whole society. Social phenomena tend to accumulate so it is useful to examine the potential costs over time.
The project for social impact
At the beginning of the project, we had a workshop with Sosped and created ideas for possible solutions. At first glance we knew we shared the same values and collaboration would be awesome.
After the workshop, we decided to limit the scope to the impact evaluation and help Sosped with some know-how of business intelligence tools. Impact evaluation can be done with various calculation tools, but we got an idea of impact evaluation made with the Power BI. To that end, Sosped gave us a framework consisting of various real-life examples. The calculations of the impact evaluation chains are complex, and we used DAX (Power BI’s formula expression language) to create the calculations.
As a result of the work, the product deployed to Sosped is a Power BI web application where a user can examine different impact chains with various dimensions like indicators and timeframes. The application has a clear and nice user interface, and it is technically accurate regarding the given framework. We had a light user experience testing session with a person who wasn’t from our or the client’s organisation. From that, we got valuable insights which we used for the finalisation of the user interface. To test the correctness of the numbers and overall features we used unit testing and regression testing methods. The project documentation consists of possible future development ideas and the executed testing plan.
We got a lot of independence for our ways of working and could deep dive into the themes that interested us the most. It can be concluded that the more independent and challenging data work is done in different domains, the more self-assurance there is for future endeavours. Most importantly, Sosped was happy and impressed by the solution. We want to thank Sosped for the collaboration!
If you seek meaningful and impactful work opportunities, see our open positions.
Read more about Sosped