Solving Volunteering Pain Points with a South African Tutoring Nonprofit

IkamvaYouth
Service Design, Research

The Challenge

IkamvaYouth is a by-youth-for-youth program that holds volunteer-provided tutoring, career guidance, and mentoring for young South Africans. They have branches all across the country. Kids who go through the program are 3x less likely to be not in education, employment, or training, and although the South African national dropout average for black university entrants is 32%, the percentage for “Ikamvanites” is only 18%. Pretty cool.

IY told us that as more students flocked to join and the organization started growing, the amount of learners started outweighing the number of volunteer tutors. They asked us to help them develop recruitment strategies to get new volunteers.

Our Solution

My research partner and I collaborated closely with IY and did over 6 months of research: Preliminary academic research, an online survey with 200+ respondents, and 30+ individual qualitative interviews with staff and volunteers. We traveled between 4 IkamvaYouth branches in the Western Cape and the Eastern Cape to conduct our interviews: Masiphumelele, Khayelitsha, Nyanga, and Joza.

We uncovered that many existing volunteers were leaving over the way IY was handling complaints and discussions with underreserouced volunteers, and recommended that IY shift their focus from recruitment to retention of existing volunteers.

We compiled our findings and recommendations into a presentation to the CEO and a full research analysis.

We also provided IY staff with 2 tools to integrate into their everyday work: An Orientation Pack, which would help tutors get familiar with the org and the resources available to them, and a guide for IY admin on how to elicit and integrate feedback from their volunteers.

Results

Our work was used as part of IkamvaYouth's "Vision 2030," to make sure all South Africans receive an adequate education and a chance out of poverty by 2030.

My roles

Service Designer
Researcher

Client

IkamvaYouth

Context

This project was part the Miller Center Fellowship, which provides students with the opportunity to learn and work with social enterprises that are on the front lines of poverty eradication and sustainable development in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the United States.

ikamvayouth.org

Preliminary Research

Before we left, we spent 3 months in the U.S. studying South Africa and its history to get as much context as possible. We also studied social enterprises and organizations who are doing work similar to IY in other parts of the world to better understand the challenge. This helped immensely in our understanding of the challenge and the social forces at work before we left.

Field Research

Once we got to Capetown, we started out with extensive qualitative research to more deeply understand the question. We visited different branches, observed tutors at work and career guidance sessions, and talked to learners, tutors, and staff members.

Talking to a staff member at the Masiphumelele branch

Pivoting our research question

Before too long, we uncovered a key insight: IY’s staff and tutors weren’t complaining about inadequate tutor recruitment, but rather, declining retention of tutors. Tutors were leaving, and IY didn’t know why.

After much thought and consideration, we understood that we needed to change our entire research question to:

How can IY better retain & support their volunteer tutors?

This was a huge turning point for us. We needed to focus more heavily on the internal tutor community and its pain points instead of external recruitment. So, we strapped in and moved ahead.

Surveys & Interviews

Over the following weeks in South Africa, we traveled between the 4 IY branches in the Western and Eastern Cape provinces, conducting many qualitative interviews and a widespread quantitative survey. Since our time in-field was relatively short, our research questions were aimed to investigate critical and immediate initiatives that IY could undertake. We discovered that tutors were eager to help, and we received many suggestions.

Online Survey

The survey addressed tutors’ demographics, backgrounds, and tutoring experiences, so we could get a better sense of who the tutors were. We offered a small financial incentive, and ended up getting a great response rate: Of IY’s approximately 300 total tutors living in 5 of South Africa’s 9 provinces, 75% (223 tutors) responded.

1:1 Qualitative Interviews

In our interviews, we focused on trying to find out as much as possible about their total IY experience. We asked about initial recruitment, ongoing engagement, and relationships with learners and staff members. We held 31 individual tutor interviews, 4 tutor focus groups, and 5 staff member interviews.

Jake and I interviewing a staff member

“We need more training and
preparation. We want to know what challenges we’ll be facing from the very beginning.”

“Not all of our voices are heard. We want more constructive discussions and feedback.”

“Ikamva needs to support us as much as it supports the learners.”

Some learners taking a break

Key insight #1

Tutors were unprepared, and needed more effective integration methods.

Many tutors expressed that they felt unprepared for what tutoring would actually be like, often having no prior experience in tutoring or mentoring. And for the tutors who travelled to unfamiliar schools to volunteer (rather than returning to tutor at their alma mater), many felt unprepared for the reality of working with students from dysfunctional schools.

Also, many tutors lacked a basic understanding of IY’s mission, programs, core values, and structure, so the experience of tutoring often felt disorganized and disconnected from the larger mission and vision. Tutors were consistently asking for some sort of standardized orientation materials.

Key insight #2

Discussions needed to focus on solutions.

We witnessed IY staff members working tirelessly to uphold the democratic nature of the organization, trying hard to value the opinions of all its members as it grows. But, when staff members held discussions with tutors to get feedback, these discussions were often unstructured and tended to elicit more complaints than solutions. Staff felt overwhelmed by tutor complaints and lack the time, resources, and energy to improve the state of communications, which in some cases started to become strained and impersonal.

Key insight #3

Growth was outpacing existing communication & feedback channels.

When tutors did offer solutions and improvements in formal meetings, they often received little to no feedback on their propositions. As a result, these tutors felt disillusioned and would often stop contributing their vision for the future of IY. And again, in these cases, staff would often feel frustrated by the lack of time, resources, and energy to get and give feedback.

Presenting the Research

We planned out the necessary deliverables based on our research, and compiled everything into a presentation for the Executive Director and Business Development Manger.
See the slides here. ➝

From left to right: Joy Olivier (Founder & Executive Director), Zoe Mann (our IY mentor), Alex Smith (Business Development Manager)

Deliverables

We returned to the U.S. and constructed 3 research-based deliverables for IY to use as resources, each aimed at the specific audience it was intended for (Read our official Executive Summary here.)

Field Research Analysis

We compiled a full report and analysis of the survey, interviews, and group discussions, intended for the national staff. We hoped this information could be a resource for the staff to use in the future to better understand tutor identities, motivations, and needs. Read it here. ➝

Orientation Pack

Written to address the needs of incoming tutors, the orientation pack was aimed to provide the tutors with a condensed, standardized hub of information including: basic IY information, background about the particular branch, and helpful tutoring materials like FAQ. It’s able to be updated, edited, and distributed as needed across all branches, made in Microsoft Word for compatibility. Read it here. ➝

Tutor Engagement Plan

Written to address the needs of branch staff, this document frames the necessity for and means of achieving meaningful, solution-based discussions between tutors and staff. It includes examples of successful discussion protocols and two separate discussion guides, one intended for staff and the other for tutors. Read it here. ➝

Presenting our work

Reflections

I learned so much throughout these 9 months; this project had a lot of ambiguity and moving pieces. I honed my research skills – practicing more cross-cultural research, conducting interviews, gathering and analyzing data, understanding how to make someone feel comfortable in an interview, understanding my role as an interviewer stepping into a well-formed community. I’m a natural observer and prefer one-on-one interaction, so I really enjoyed the experience.

Measuring the success of our deliverables

Since we used all our time in the field to conduct research, I regret that we couldn’t make a plan for measuring the success of the deliverables. We did get immensely positive feedback for them, but I would have loved to further test and iterate on the deliverables.

Being efficient with our time

We travelled to so many branches and did so many interviews, that we really needed to understand what expectations and goals we had going into each day. We also needed time to process and understand what we’d gained from that day.

Writing everything down

I learned not to trust my memory! My notebook became an extension of my arm. :-)

Discerning my vocation

I reflected a lot on the meaning I felt from working with IkamvaYouth. We spoke with many people so driven for the mission and the feeling of being a part of something larger, and that energy was tangible and contagious. Through this experience and others I’ve had since then, I’ve learned how important it is for me to feel like I’m working on something that’s really affecting people’s lives.