Rosh Mehta and Jenny Zhu share their analysis
Hello!
We’re honored for another DSO-year of working on amazing projects with amazing social impact partners around the world. We also did something that helped us empathize better with what our partners may experience when doing projects with us: we turned ourselves into the client. We asked for help improving our website and improving how we recruit and retain teammates.
Featured Project
Our 2019 social impact case competition focused on improving how we recruit and retain teammates at DSO. Students are an active and core part of our organization, and we engaged 10 student teams from Carnegie Mellon University and Robert Morris University to share their ideas and solutions. It was a very insightful “for Students by Students” approach. The case competition resulted in immediately implementable improvements to DSO’s website and GlobalGiving page, as well as a tactical 6-month action plan for creating a more engaging and simplified recruiting process, developing partnerships with universities and local communities, and enabling more student leadership. The case competition also ended with many participants signing up to join DSO!
To make this case competition a success, DSO partnered with Carnegie Mellon University’s American Marketing Association and Undergraduate Consulting Club. Carnegie Mellon Professor Joy Lu and Academic Advisor and Program Manager Dr. Stephen Pajewski helped prep the students and helped judge the case competition respectively. We’re so grateful for everyone’s hard work (on all aspects from smooth logistics to overall experience), creativity, and guidance to make this an energizing and helpful experience.
Congrats to the first-place team: Matthew Guo, Ankita Kundu, and Hinna Hafiz! (our ‘DSO Family’ messaging up-front and center is because of their insights)
DSO teammates Kelly Mok, Maria Rymer, Anthony Buchanan, Saurabh Sanghvi, Marcy Held, and Amy Badiani helped put the case together, participated in judging, and discussed social impact with the participants.
Testimonials
“I loved learning about DSO’s mission. It’s inspiring to see people at all stages of their career come together to work on social impact. The case competition presented a unique challenge that required us to think outside of the box and combine our experiences with marketing skills. Our strategy was to expand upon the potential of students, increase the presence, and develop more personal connections. We presented on ideas such as leveraging student networks, informalizing the interview process, and targeting alumni at prestigious companies. The DSO team was encouraging and gave thoughtful feedback throughout the process, which made the case competition an absolute joy to work on.”
- Roshni Mehta, Case Comp Participant & Student, Carnegie Mellon University
“The case competition was great! The teams all approached the problem differently and we are already implementing several suggestions - improving our website, better showcasing our value proposition and great team members, and simplifying our student outreach. We look forward to some of the team members joining DSO to co-create their vision with us.”
- Anthony Buchanan, CXO, DSO
