A typical SCNO engagement lasts for ten weeks and consists of five consultants, one team lead and four team members, collaborating with each nonprofit. The team receives support from a Project Manager, an SCNO exec member that provides feedback, guidance, and resources to the team, and from a Professional Mentor in the consulting field. Our mentors come from top consulting organizations such as McKinsey, BCG, Bain and Co., PwC, and other firms who provide incredible guidance and development for the project and our members.
OUR APPROACH INCLUDES THREE COMPONENTS
Hypothesis Based Testing
Hypothesis-based testing is a logic model that allows our consultants to quickly identify a potential solution and utilize data to iterate on this hypothesis until accurate. Our consultants go through a process of first clarifying and identifying the problem, next creating mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive logic trees that effectively breakdown the problem into a series of sub-hypotheses, and then filling in gaps in information through research and data analysis, narrowing down the hypotheses to identify the best course of action. By utilizing this approach, SCNO is able to support its suggestions through empirical findings and a fact-based research.
In-DEPTH research
Leveraging the immense resources available to Northwestern students from access to professors and professionals to an immense library of information, SCNO consultants conduct in-depth research to develop best possible solutions to the identified hypotheses. Through surveys, interviews, and competitive landscape analysis, SCNO teams gain context-specific knowledge of each non-profit’s strengths and areas of improvement, which allow the teams to hone in on the most feasible and impact-oriented solutions
Action-oriented Deliverable Creation
Through critical analysis and information synthesis, SCNO teams then take the information gathered from the research phase and develop action-oriented solutions for the non-profit, compiling all the work conducted over the past ten weeks into one final deliverable. This action-centric approach means that the consultants then verify suggestions by initiating solutions on a small scale to gauge its efficacy and efficiency. For example, in a past engagement, SCNO suggested partnering with the PTA in various school districts. The team actually contacted the various PTA organizations, and received a number of responses. Through this approach, the SCNO teams are not only able to validate their suggestions, but also ease the transition from the consulting phase to the non-profit’s implementation phase, ensuring the impact of our work.