Consulting Magazine - October 2016

AWARDS
20
1
6

Prophet

Every year, Prophet dedicates a full day to helping nonprofits in local communities with its Prophet for Nonprofit Day. In 2016, across nine offices, the firm’s 300-plus employees helped 36 nonprofits, which support a number of causes, including childhood literacy, AIDS relief, environmental conservation and the arts.

The firm dedicates a full day
to helping nonprofits in local
communities with various brand,
“We help these nonprofits to grow
better so they can make an even larger
impact in the communities they serve,” he
says. “This also provides Prophet with an
opportunity to live our values and deliver
on our mission to build brands, transform
businesses, and move society.”
The key thing, Dunn says, is that leaders
of the nonprofits walk away with some-
thing actionable, specific and tangible at
the end of the day. Some are looking for an
audience development strategy or a donor
development strategy or a new micro-site or
a new logo or new messaging around their
brand, he says. “That’s one of the central
ideas,” he says. “It could be strategic, it
could be tactical, but it must be actionable.”
One engagement from this year was
for Usher 2020 Foundation, a non-profit
dedicated to advancing scientific research
to cure blindness caused by the Usher
Syndrome (the leading genetic cause of
deaf-blindness) by the year 2020.

Usher 2020 engaged Prophet to help
them create a viable funding and awareness
campaign to help them raise money and
move vision-loss research forward into clini-
cal trials. They began a social media cam-
paign in September to generate awareness
and in a few short weeks, they have already
increased their Twitter followers by 82
percent, Instagram followers by 60 percent,
and Facebook followers by 30 percent.
Each nonprofit is assigned a custom-
ized Prophet team, composed of the right
mix of consultants, designers and ana-
lysts to best address the organization’s
challenges. They prepare for the day, by
reviewing the challenge/opportunity, gath-
ering appropriate research and inspiration,
and designing the full-day session.

Everyone from Prophet, from senior leadership to office managers, come together to work on the challenge and the “mashup of talent, skills, ideas, and different perspective produce great ideas and outcomes,” Dunn says.

Not only do the nonprofits get a lot of
the experience, but the employees do too,
Dunn says. “Many employees comment
on how it is their favorite work day of the
year and it is a nice complement to our
other social/community work including
office volunteer days and other pro-bono
and low-bono consulting work.”
And, he says the Prophet for Nonprofit
Day actually inverts the firm’s typical leader-
ship model. “We gave some of the younger
people in the organization responsibility for
this day and putting those decisions into the
hands of some of our mid-level and youngest
employees has been powerful,” Dunn says.
“It’s created an amazing amount of energy
and enthusiasm. It’s been amazing.”