Accenture volunteers deliver nonprofit capacity building technology for Present Age Ministries
Present Age Ministries is committed to combating the sexual abuse, exploitation and trafficking of teen girls. They equip communities to identify at-risk teen girls through prevention and awareness education and to support survivors through holistic, individualized care.
Present Age Ministries (PAM) has been challenged with meeting the demand for Human Trafficking awareness training by the community, including Law Enforcement, Teachers, Health Care Professionals, and more. Currently, these trainings are conducted in person, and are limited to the availability of the facilitator and attendees.
As the recipient of the 2022 Mission Possible Award, sponsored by Accenture, PAM partnered with an Accenture volunteer team to assess their current state of delivering Human Trafficking awareness training and content, identify and document business requirements for a LMS, identify potential solutions, demoing and evaluating potential solutions, empowering PAM to make the best decision for their organization, and implementing the new LMS. Through this work, they selected and are implementing Moodle as the LMS and also Synthesia as a content creation tool.
- Volunteer team: Accenture – Craig Cooksey and Stephen Christiansen
- Nonprofit team: Hannah Arrowood, Kami Biastes
After the project was completed, we met with Hannah Arrowood, Executive Director and Kami Biastes, Communications Director, to learn about the significance and anticipated impact.
Before working with Apparo, nonprofit capacity building was a key organizational goal
The team was stretched thin because, in order to ensure high quality content, they were delivering all training in person. They had tried developing recorded trainings and found the process cumbersome for creating and updating their content. Running these in-person training had many downsides:
- Significant time to schedule
- Anyone who could not make it in person that day would miss the content
- Content could not be leveraged across different audiences
- Content not always delivered in consistent fashion
The new software will help meet goals of increasing trafficking prevention and victim identification
The Present Age Ministries team anticipates many powerful benefits:
- Freed staff time and capacity for leadership team and care coordinators, 250 hours+ annually
- 100+ annual community awareness events – currently 2-3 of admin time each would decrease by half, saving 150 hours annually
- 5 Professional trainings annually – currently 5 hours of admin team each would decrease by half, saving 12 hours annually
- Ongoing case management – care coordinators will be able to leverage on-demand content, which will save approximately 8 hours a month or 96 hours annually
- Staff and volunteer onboarding time will be cut in half
- 3 international projects a year – will save admin and translation time and expense
- Increased reach of content to drive awareness internationally – Ability to easily create and translate short videos that can be digested via phones globally; this can also drive increased fundraising
- Increased earned revenue – Ability to create more high-quality content for paid audiences, fulfilling the market demand that they simply cannot currently
- Improved effectiveness of education process, mitigating risk of old/false information being spread
- Ease of updating content
- Ability to ensure consistency and accuracy of content, rather than being exposed to human error
- Access to data on who took which training when and who is due for an update
Kami elaborates on the importance, “Accuracy and consistency in our messaging is very important because we are one of the few vetted agencies in the state to serve minors. We have information that other people don’t have.”
Hannah adds, “We are excited to be able to create powerful content, keep it up to date on the latest tactics and increase the reach of that content, so that we can educate more people without constantly having to duplicate our efforts. The more people we educate, the more we can increase victim identification and prevent trafficking.”
Words of appreciation were shared by the project team
Hannah Arrowood– “We are grateful for the opportunity with Apparo and Accenture. Gaining access to people, concepts, and resources will have an impact on our operations far beyond what we anticipated with the scope of this project. We are eager to see how this will continue to help us advance the mission of Present Age.”
Kami Biastes – “It has been a pleasure and privilege to collaborate with Apparo and Accenture to create and implement a digital system that will expand the impact and influence of Present Age. We would not have been able to implement such a robust system to meet the needs of our community without the support and mastery provided by our Subject Matter Experts.”
Craig Cooksey (Volunteer) – “Working with Present Age Ministries has been beyond a privilege to get to do. The work that they do is beyond critical, it’s essential. To be able to contribute, even in the slightest way, is absolute honor. Hannah and her team are phenomenal human beings and are carrying out a mission that deserves support and awareness in and from ever sphere possible. I certainly will be doing everything I can to continue to support PAM into the future. “
