The Net Impact TMU student association is the Ted Rogers MBA-led chapter of Net Impact, a nonprofit that empowers a new generation to use their careers to drive transformational change in the workplace and the world. The local chapter is comprised of MBA students, alumni and faculty focused on promoting social and environmental change through community partnership in Canada.
Over the summer, Net Impact TMU partnered with World Vision Canada on a pro bono consulting project. The students involved in the project played an instrumental role in a research initiative and produced a report for the charity gaining valuable networking and learning opportunities along the way.
Here is what two of the students said about their experience:
Christian Legare-Rivera
TMU’s Net Impact Non-Profit Consulting Project gave us the opportunity to ideate, plan, build and deliver a project focused on product design and user engagement for World Vision Canada. Over the course of three months, we designed and completed a three-stage project life cycle: Brand Analysis, Content Strategy and Production.
We worked hand in hand with the World Vision Canada team to ensure alignment with the organization’s values, goals and key research areas. Shilpa’s collaborative efforts offered a truly unique opportunity, combining practical experience and mentorship, using the business casing skills we honed through the Ted Rogers MBA program, while also expanding our subject matter expertise and UX research skills.
Our presentations to the product experts at World Vision Canada allowed us to directly advise the leadership team, including Vice-President of Product Josh Folkema. Hearing their feedback, questions and insights on our continued project direction was an invaluable learning experience.
While we can’t divulge the specific topics of our project yet, we still can’t wait to share how our project made real impacts at World Vision in future. Stay tuned!
Matt Athayde
Looking back at this experience, what stands out most is how our team learned to bring structure to something that initially felt wide open. That, I suppose, was our truest introduction to consulting, the process of figuring out how to keep work structured when the field is ambiguous.
We began with a broad brief and spent time unpacking what the real problem was before we could even think about solutions. From there, we moved through brand analysis, mapped the audience landscape and built out pathways for content strategy and production. Each stage was unfamiliar at first, but we treated it like a consulting case: break down the complexity, test assumptions and keep pushing until the picture became clearer.
For me, the challenge, and the reward, was learning how to keep momentum when the scope itself kept shifting. Though it is not a particularly original revelation, learning how to craft questions was my greatest aid in doing so. A well placed question, whether to the client, to your teammates or folded into the heart of your deliverable can bring your entire team back into alignment, produce sharper insights or deliver them in a way the client can best act on. But to ask questions, one must be comfortable in the ‘gray zone’ of strategy, always working through ambiguity to ever greener fields of clarity without losing sight of the bigger goals.
By the end, the final research phase felt like proof of how far we’d come as a team. We weren’t just reacting anymore, we had developed a consulting toolkit for tackling amorphous problems, piece by piece. That lesson, how to take an open-ended challenge, break it down into manageable parts, and deliver something coherent, is the part of this project I’ll carry forward into whatever comes next.
