A project that empowers Peruvian women entrepreneurs

Professional project

Women Entrepreneurs: Changing Lives, Nurturing Dreams

DESIGN CHALLENGE

Banco de Credito del Peru (BCP) is the main bank in the country. Among its main axes is Social Action that has the purpose of transforming people's plans into reality.

The objective of this project was to redesign the volunteering experience for BCP collaborators (service redesign), so that from their role as an agent of change, they contribute to their country and enhance their professional and personal side.

As a result of the research and ideation process, Mujeres Emprendedoras BCP was born, which today is the bank's flagship program that seeks to strengthen women's micro-businesses by making the talent of BCP employees available.

Problem

The corporate volunteer program does not align with the bank's objectives. Current activities cannot be scaled to all of Peru.

Solution

New volunteer program focused on the volunteer and the beneficiary, scalable, cost-efficient, aligned with the bank's business line.

Impact

+3,500 women entrepreneurs across the country benefited, positive reputational impact for the bank.

ROLe

UX Researcher

Responsible for providing actionable and meaningful insights from quantitative and qualitative research. Collaborated and supported end-to-end social innovation projects.

team

1 Design Strategist
2 UX Researchers
3 Design Researchers
1 Visual Designer

year

2019

year

"Design has the power to positively enhance lives"

visit the project

How did we do it?

We use two frameworks: Design Thinking, it helped to know and test the user experience while Agile (Scrum) allowed us to prioritize and focus efforts.

01

discover

Exploring current reality

The Bank sought to generate a new model of corporate volunteering (Volunteering 2.0), which takes advantage of its resources and which would connect with its purpose: "we transform your plans into reality".

‍

To do this, it was first necessary to understand how it had been running until that moment:

‍

  • We mapped the internal / external stakeholders of the project and then we had in-depth interviews to understand their needs and expectations.
  • We define user personas (profiles) of the volunteers, to know their motivations, behaviors and frustrations.
  • Definimos user personas (perfiles) de los voluntarios,  para conocer sus motivaciones, comportamientos y frustraciones.
  • We identified the journeys of the different activities that were already being carried out in volunteering: Suma, Campañas e Ideas Voluntarias.
  • We identify the pain points of each journey and group them into categories.

We analyze the journeys of the different volunteer actions identifying: actors, stages and processes, actions and critical points.

Identifying the critical points of the volunteer program

Having critical points is natural, especially when they have never been mapped. Having them written allowed us to see how they impacted on the experience and motivation of the collaborators before, during and after carrying out the volunteer activities.

02

define

Towards a new model of volunteering

Once we understood how the corporate volunteering program works today, the profiles of collaborators who participated, their experience in each activity and the pain points, we decided to ask ourselves the following guiding question that served as a compass:

How might we reimagine BCP's “volunteering” and ensure that it is aligned with our purpose, that it reaches all collaborators, that it is cost-efficient and that it has a tangible impact on society?

BANK

  • Strengthen the reputation of the BCP (trust with Public Opinion).
  • Position the BCP as a leader in corporate volunteering.
  • Boost internal talent and collaboration.
  • Positioning of the BCP brand.

voluntEER

  • Positive impact on society.
  • Be a space of satisfaction beyond your work.
  • Give you an emotional connection with the beneficiaries.

SOCIETY

  • Address an important and priority problem for society.
  • Leave useful and necessary tools for people's daily lives.
  • Inspire and be a reference (people and sectors).

A system for Volunteering 2.0

To answer the previous question, we decided to rethink the bank's volunteering because, currently as a program, it was more oriented to voluntary initiatives and did not have a system with defined roles and rules beyond these initiatives.

It was necessary to establish a management model that allows to standardize processes and activities, measure results and establish measurable objectives. Identifying the critical points in the research stage helped us to identify opportunities for improvement for the system.

The model has 4 large stages: the strategic stage, the community-building stage, the execution stage, and the results and growth stage. Each of these has its components, which are the pieces that make up each stage. The components are those things that help us build a community, or those that help us execute and plan the implementation of voluntary actions or what we must consider in the results and growth stage.

Establishing design guidelines

After defining the management model for volunteering, we established the design guidelines (design principles), which were our guide throughout the process. These guidelines ensured that the solution that would be proposed in the ideation stage generates value for all stakeholders (bank, volunteers and society).

Aligned to the
CORE business of BCP

Aligned to the Bank's culture

high
Impact

Sustainable + Scalable + Cost-efficient

Made with and
from society

Align and empower collaborators

03

ideate

Co-creating the purpose and concepts with collaborators

After defining the management model and design guidelines, we held workshops with collaborators and volunteers to co-create and build possible solutions (concepts).

First, we co-create the purpose of volunteering, for this we ask ourselves:

‍

  • How do we want to leave a mark on the 16 thousand BCP collaborators in our country?
  • How do we want to impact our society from volunteering at the bank?
  • How do we want society to impact the volunteer program? ‍

‍

After voting, we choose the following purpose:

"We empower our talents to together
transform our country"

Subsequently, to reflect and encourage the generation of ideas about the new activities that the program would offer, we asked the following questions how might we ...

How might we make people constantly motivated to participate in social outreach activities?

How might we organically and consistently involve leaders in outreach activities?

How might we generate positive actions for society that are linked to the purpose of the BCP?

How might we make outreach activities feel like a break from work?

How might we make the impact of social assistance tangible at all times?

How might we decentralize social aid activities from now on?

As a result of reflection and brainstorming of activities, the 3 best proposals (concepts) were chosen by vote:

Finanzas en mi cole

Responsible finance workshop for 3rd and 4th grade students of public schools through a tangible project: generate savings to invest in the implementation of a library and / or school supplies

Mentoring a becarios

Mentoring and workshops for low-income youth from institutes and universities of the BCP Scholarship program to help them with their finances, job placement and professional life.

Mujeres Emprendedoras BCP

Workshops and mentoring with a focus on finance for businesswomen from various clusters in order to help them grow their businesses.

Prototyping the experience of concepts

Now we had to co-create the experience of those 3 chosen concepts. To do this, we provide 3 ways to prototype this experience: Storyboards, Roleplaying and Lego Serious Play (LSP).

Our objective was to understand the interaction through the active participation of the end users (collaborators and volunteers), as well as to understand the different points of contact in each concept.

04

implement

Assessing the impact of solutions

Of the 3 concepts developed in the ideation stage, one needed to choose one to be piloted. To establish this, we identify their strengths and weaknesses, and we also use success factors. The final decision was made by the committee (made up of the bank's senior management).

The solution to pilot

The concept chosen to be executed in the pilot was Mujeres Emprendedoras BCP by the criteria shown in the previous section.

Mujeres Emprendedoras BCP

Initiative where BCP Volunteers will be able to share their professional and personal experience with low-income women entrepreneurs from different productive clusters, in order to help them grow their businesses and be leaders in their community.

Workshops

1-day trainings where volunteers share their knowledge, advise women entrepreneurs to help them grow and strengthen their businesses.

Mentoring

Weekly consultations of 1 or 2 hours where the volunteers will share with a businesswoman different topics related to her business and her personal growth.

Advisor network

Network of experts who participate by helping mentoring teams with specific queries and sharing content of interest with volunteers.

It was decided to do the pilot in two different places: Lima and Piura. We take this opportunity to also test the management model.

Gamarra, Lima

+30K entrepreneurs
94.5% are micro-businesses
53% led by women

Villa El Salvador, Lima

+300K entrepreneurs
+93% are micro-businesses
20% led by women

Piura

The El Niño Phenomenon brought emotional, financial and commercial problems

Pilot: making the impact of design tangible

The time had come! It was time to put everything built from service design to the test.

Pilot learnings

The pilot was a success, we had a much greater range than we set ourselves. There was a word-of-mouth effect on the part of the entrepreneurs, which caused them to sign up for and attend workshops and mentoring more than we had projected.

We listened to the businesswomen and volunteers, we learned a lot!! Here are some of the most important learnings:
‍

There is a difficult balance to achieve in the organizational structure of the volunteers.

  • Lead volunteers are great allies when building teams.
  • The support of the leaders greatly reduces the burden of the volunteer team; however, giving them a lot of autonomy creates imbalances and hierarchies with the larger group.
  • We must reduce the uncertainty of the volunteers, the more information about the process we give them, the less anguish they feel.

‍

Rethink and balance the roles and responsibilities of the volunteers in the workshops.

Replantear y balancear los roles y responsabilidades de los voluntarios en los talleres.

  • Anticipation and preparation for volunteers are very important. There is a lot of anxiety if they don't have a clear guideline and process that they can build on. They need to be clear about the big picture.
  • Online trainings work as long as everything that is done in person can be replicated, it is important that these resources are thought of as trainings.

05

Launching

Empowering women microentrepreneurs

Finally, after a long and beautiful process of collective learning, the new corporate volunteering program was deployed:

Currently, due to the pandemic, the program has been carried out virtually, which has allowed it to have a much greater scope and impact.

Women Entrepreneurs BCP has been the winner of the Peru award for the Sustainable Development Goals (PODS) 2020 organized by the UN, KPMG and El Comercio.

Mujeres Emprendedoras BCP

Mujeres Emprendedoras BCP