Inspire and Summer Search have worked together on the following:

Expanding Summer Search’s offering

Summer Search looked to expand its impact in the youth space by sharing mentorship practices and best practices with other organizations. The Inspire team first evaluated Summer Search's current offerings and competitive advantages, benchmarked these offerings, and determined the final set of services that Summer Search could offer in the mentoring space. The team developed two distinct go-to-market strategies using customer interviews and target profiles to help Summer Search conceptualize how its unique service could be delivered to organizations. 

Building Out a Data Organization

Summer Search sought to learn best practices and ideas from a variety of peers as it built a revised national data systems strategy. Inspire synthesized ~10 discussions with Summer Search’s peers into a set of best practices to help propel the organization’s data capabilities into a ‘best-in-class’ model to maximize impact. Final output included:

The overall goal of data collection, analyzing, and reporting

Effective reporting practices for leadership and the board

The organizational structure of the data team

Level of investment to effectively capture, analyze, and report out data

Alteryx and Tableau Support

Summer Search recently acquired new data management tools – Tableau and Alteryx – but needed support putting them into use. Inspire volunteers helped build solutions that enabled Summer Search to access, query, and visualize important program and operational data for longitudinal operational use.

Establishing a go-forward caseload management framework [Ongoing in Feb. ‘23]

Summer Search seeks to alleviate feelings of intensity expressed by mentoring staff and ensure alignment of workload assignments with the organization’s purpose and values. The Inspire team is evaluating current mentor-to-mentee ratios and building a go-forward decision-making framework for implementation in 2024. Leveraging mentor interviews, a survey of peer organizations, secondary research, and the organization’s internal data, Inspire is working to:

Determine best practices for caseload assignment

Understand which factors impact the level of support needed by mentees and a mentor’s capacity to support mentees

Understand key indicators of mentor, mentee, and organization wellness / satisfaction

Building on the momentum, Inspire & Summer Search continue the discussion today and are actively following up about the past projects and ongoing work. 

“One of the great things about working the team at Inspire is the added capacity and expertise that they have added to our staff team, to position us to think big about what is possible and then to take the steps to get there,” says Megan Sussman, VP of Development at Summer Search.

The repeated collaboration across several projects has allowed Inspire to deepen the relationship with Summer Search, more effectively make recommendations, and follow-up on implementation and ongoing strategic initiatives. 

“The joint partnership and significant buy-in from Summer Search has allowed Inspire to be thought partners and more effectively advise Summer Search on their impactful program,” said Inspire’s Mid-Atlantic Regional Director Dario Zarrabian. “Working with the numerous stakeholders and leadership members at Summer Search has allowed us to see the full portfolio of operations and provide more targeted support.”

Summer Search has adopted several of the recommendations, and continues to lean on the work in partnership with Inspire in its strategic and annual planning. National Director of Alumni Strategy & Development Seth Ellis says, “The Inspire team engaged peers in our industry, gathered important insights and perspectives, and developed a robust set of best practices and proposals for our upcoming strategic plan. This work added so much capacity to our team that simply wouldn’t have been possible without them.”

“What really stood out to me, though, was how collaborative the teams were, how they kept our staff informed, and continually ensured the work was on the right track and relevant to our goals. We ended up with a high-quality, highly usable product in the end,” Seth Ellis continued.

Inspire’s Executive Director, Jon Holtzman, stated, “By partnering with a highly impactful and dedicated organization like Summer Search, we continue to build a better world and help other nonprofits do the same.”

Summer Search and Inspire are expected to continue working together in the coming months across projects.