Helping a South African education nonprofit understand how to retain their volunteers.

IkamvaYouth is a by-youth-for-youth program that holds after-school tutoring, career guidance, and mentoring for young South Africans, all of which are provided for free by volunteers. They have branches all across the country.

IY drives community change through a culture of cooperation and responsibility, and they have a track record to prove it. According to a 2016 alumni survey, kids who go through the program are 3x less likely to be not in education, employment, or training, and although the South African national dropout average for black university entrants is 32%, the percentage for Ikamvanites is only 18%. Pretty cool.

As part of the Global Social Benefit Fellowship through the Miller Center for Social Entrepreneurship, I was able to partner with IkamvaYouth as a researcher for 9 months in 2015 to help them address pain points in their business.

How can IY recruit more volunteer tutors?

IY told us that as more student learners flocked to join and the organization started growing, the amount of learners started outweighing the number of volunteer tutors.

Following the outline of the fellowship, we approached our process as follows:

Preliminary research

We spent 3 months before we left (during the school year) studying South Africa, its history, race inequality, and the country’s education situation to get as much context as possible. We also studied social enterprises and organizations who are doing work similar to IY in other parts of the world to better understand the challenge. This helped immensely in our understanding of the challenge and the social forces at work before we left.

Field research

Once we got to SA, we started out with extensive qualitative research to more deeply understand the question. We visited different branches, observed tutors at work and career guidance sessions, and talked to learners, tutors, and staff members.

A realization

Before too long, we uncovered a key insight: IY’s staff and tutors weren’t complaining about inadequate tutor recruitment, but rather, declining retention of tutors. Tutors were leaving, and IY didn’t know why.

After much thought and consideration, we understood that we needed to change our entire research question to:

How can IY better retain & support their volunteer tutors?

This was a huge turning point for us. We needed to focus more heavily on the internal tutor community and its pain points. So, we strapped in and moved ahead.

Over the following weeks in South Africa, we traveled between the 4 IY branches in the Western and Eastern Cape provinces, conducting many qualitative interviews and a widespread quantitative survey. Since our time in-field was relatively short, our research questions were aimed to investigate critical and immediate initiatives that IY could undertake. We discovered that tutors were eager to help, and we received many suggestions.

Online survey

The survey addressed tutors’ demographics, backgrounds, and tutoring experiences, so we could get a better sense of who the tutors were. We got a pretty good response rate; of IY’s approximately 300 total tutors living in 5 of South Africa’s 9 provinces, 223 responded.

Qualitative interviews

Interviews focused on trying to find out as much as possible about their total IY experience: initial recruitment, ongoing engagement, relationships with learners and staff members. We held 31 individual interviews and 4 focus groups with tutors, and 5 individual interviews with staff members.

After synthesizing and analyzing our research from the surveys and interviews, we found a few key insights:

We planned out the necessary deliverables based on our research, and compiled everything into a presentation for the Executive Director and Business Development Manger. See the slides here. ➝

We returned to the U.S. and constructed 3 research-based deliverables for IY to use as resources, each aimed at the specific audience it was intended for (Read our official Executive Summary here.)

1. Field Research Analysis

We compiled a full report and analysis of the survey, interviews, and group discussions, intended for the national staff. We hoped this information could be a resource for the staff to use in the future to better understand tutor identities, motivations, and needs. Read it here. ➝

2. Orientation Pack

Written to address the needs of incoming tutors, the orientation pack was aimed to provide the tutors with a condensed, standardized hub of information including: basic IY information, background about the particular branch, and helpful tutoring materials like FAQ. It’s able to be updated, edited, and distributed as needed across all branches, made in Microsoft Word for compatibility. Read it here. ➝

3. Tutor Engagement Plan

Written to address the needs of branch staff, this document frames the necessity for and means of achieving meaningful, solution-based discussions between tutors and staff. It includes examples of successful discussion protocols and two separate discussion guides, one intended for staff and the other for tutors. Read it here. ➝

I learned so much throughout these 9 months; this project had a lot of ambiguity and moving pieces. I honed my research skills – practicing more cross-cultural research, conducting interviews, gathering and analyzing data, understanding how to make someone feel comfortable in an interview, understanding my role as an interviewer stepping into a well-formed community. I’m a natural observer and prefer one-on-one interaction, so I really enjoyed the experience.

Following up with the organization regarding our deliverables

Since we used all our time in the field to conduct research, we weren’t able to form a plan for measuring the success of the deliverables. We did get immensely positive feedback for them, but, I’m pretty detail- and result-oriented, and would have loved to further test and iterate on the deliverables.

Being efficient with our time

We travelled to so many branches and did so many interviews, that we really needed to understand what expectations and goals we had going into each day. We also needed time to process and understand what we’d gained from that day.

Writing everything down

I learned not to trust my memory! My notebook became an extension of my arm. :-)

Discerning my vocation

I reflected a lot on the meaning I felt from working with IkamvaYouth. We spoke with many people so driven for the mission and the feeling of being a part of something larger, and that energy was tangible and contagious. Through this experience and others I’ve had since then, I’ve learned how important it is for me to feel like I’m working on something that’s really affecting people’s lives.

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