Changemaking

Changemaking is a tiered online collaboration platform that connects tertiary youth looking for meaningful, quality upskilling opportunities with sustainability-focused social enterprises that need temporary talent.

Changemaking is a tiered online collaboration platform (currently on Weebly + Airtable) that allows sustainability-focused social enterprises to outsource tasks to tertiary students who would like to put their real-world, business related skills in action.

Tertiary students (with or without prior work (job/internship/freelancing) experience) who would like to upskill through completing real-world work and tasks can create a profile on our platform. 

Sustainability-focused social enterprises who wish to outsource skill-based tasks can create a profile and post skill-based task listings on our platform.

Regarding student profiles, tertiary students with prior job experience will be required to submit testimonials and other relevant documentation as proof of their prior work experience. Social enterprises can also state whether or not they would prefer to outsource to students with prior work experience.

Both the tertiary students and social enterprises will have their profiles verified and reviewed by us. Personal and contact information on the students' profiles will be anonymised by us before listing them on our platform. After that, students with skills that match the skills required for the tasks the social enterprises are outsourcing will be matched to the social enterprises and both parties will be contacted by us (currently through email).

1. Problems:
   1. Social Enterprises:
      1. No need for or lack of resources (especially lack of enough cashflow and finances) to hire full-time skilled employees
         (According to a survey done by Singapore's RaiSE in 2017, 64% of social enterprises stated "improving business model to achieve
         financial sustainability" as their top priority, leaving little finances for hiring more permanent skilled workers).
      2. Too many staff who specialise in certain areas of sustainability-related expertise and who do not have enough general business skills such as marketing, sales, social-media-management et cetera (According to a survey done by CNBC in 2019, 52% of respondents stated that "the most important problem for small businesses was labour quality". For social enterprises who are still growing, they are bound to face the same problem.
         Meanwhile, in the same RaiSE survey, 30% of social enterprises surveyed included "talent acquisition" in their list of top challenges).
   2. Tertiary Youth:
      1. Lack future-preparedness and skills necessary for entering the future workforce
      2. Face much competition for internships, training opportunities, work attachments and part-time jobs that help them gain work experience and boost their portfolio
         (The 2020 edition of Singapore's annual Joint Autonomous Universities Graduate Employment Survey, found that "69.8% of fresh graduates found permanent full-time jobs last year, down from 81.7% in 2019. "
         "Of the graduates who found employment, the percentage of those in part-time or temporary jobs rose sharply from 7% to 22.3%", showing the increase in demand for temporary employment in recent years).
   3. Tertiary Institutions:
      1. Lack of real-world, relevant education-and-career-guidance-programmes for students to help them enter the working world.

Users:

1. Tertiary students without prior work (job/internship/freelancing) experience
2. Tertiary students with prior work experience
3. Social enterprises in the sustainability, agritech and food waste-management industries that need help with and would like to outsource tasks related to administration, bookkeeping, marketing, sales, research et cetera to the talented tertiary students
4. Tertiary institutions who hope to boost their existing ECG (education and career guidance) programmes for current and prospective students.

Tertiary students often struggle with getting good jobs and gaining relevant industry and business skills to start their careers. As such, many of them turn to job discovery opportunities such as internships in order to gain these benefits. However, competition for these opportunities is high, and the chances of the average tertiary student getting selected for such an opportunity (in Singapore) is low at approximately 35% of tertiary students (Statista, 2021).
Tertiary institutions' current ECG programmes have also not helped students much with their job-discovery quests as proven by the decrease in fresh graduates who found employment from 2019 to 2020. Moreover, these programmes have also been hampered by the restrictions in workplaces caused by COVID-19.

Meanwhile, environmentally-focused social enterprises in Singapore usually lack the need for or the resources (cashflow, time, HR departments) to hire permanent skilled employees (check above statistics). 

With us, students gain business skills, future-readiness and soft skills while exploring areas of work in the fields of sustainability, agritech and food-waste-management. Moreover, Skilled students will also have the opportunity to earn money while upskilling for the social enterprises in need.

Firstly, as students, we realised that there was a gap between students who want to gain work-experience, innovation in the sustainability industry and social enterprises who need temporary manpower.

Secondly, after pivoting from a previous idea to the current solution, we did a few rounds of outreach and market-research involving prospective users.

We sent out our website link with blurbs of information about Changemaking to student, institution or social enterprise-focused groups on various social-media-platforms - Telegram, Discord, Whatsapp, email, Instagram, Facebook & LinkedIn, and got Singaporean tertiary students, tertiary institutions and sustainability-focused social enterprises to fill up an Airtable interest-form on our website. 
The survey gauged our respective readers' level of interest in our solution after looking through the portions of the website pertaining to them.
(For quantitative-data that we derived from this exercise, check out our pitch video).

Data screenshot (anonymised):

We also had 9 individual f2f conversations with various students, social enterprise employees/owners and working professionals to learn more about our prospective users, their upskilling/outsourcing needs, and actual user demand for our product. We did this through a combination of Whatsapp, Discord and Telegram chats. The questions we asked our contacts ranged from asking them about their education routes and current careers, to asking them about what opportunities they wished they had when they were tertiary students. Through their responses, we found out more about their career/skill-discovery-journeys, their passions, areas-of-interest in sustainability, level-of-interest in Changemaking and so on.
The data served as our qualitative-data.

Example (anonymised):

Positive reception to Changemaking:

Done:

We have built a basic MVP, our Weebly website.

During a competition we had participated in previously, we pivoted, organising two main market outreach and user research efforts thereafter which cemented our hypothesis that there was demand for our (new) solution.

The first determined market demand from tertiary students.
Meanwhile, the second determined market demand from social enterprises such as Hay Dairies and also opened doors to potential partnerships with course-providers such as Answered.sg.

We've also pitched Changemaking to panels of entrepreneurs, investors and working professionals and gotten validation and some feedback from them.

To-Do:

Launch our MVP to 

as a pilot-programme, for 6 months. After the programme, refine the business-model and/or MVP if necessary and get feedback from past users. 

With mentorship, we have plans to develop the basic MVP into an actual, full-fledged and fully self-coded website in the future, with integrations such as Stripe for payments, Google Analytics for user-journey tracking, Airtable for user databases, security integrations et cetera, in the next 2 years.

After refinement, incorporate Changemaking as a formal business in Singapore and launch our platform to the general population. 

(For more details on to who, when and how we'll launch, please check the projected customers section).

As of now, our platform is a very minimally viable product, built with a pretty simple tech stack consisting of:

1. A Weebly website and URL
2. Airtable databases
3. Personal data encryption
4. Airtable automata and email platforms
5. Google Analytics for tracking user journeys (quite basic at the moment)
6. Manual (F2F/Paylah/Paynow/Credit Card Payment) for social enterprise subscription fees, social enterprise-to-Skilled student payment, student transaction fees and tertiary institution subscription fees

However, in the future, we hope to use a more versatile and secure tech stack which will allow us to create a more secure and user-friendly platform. The future tech stack we have in mind right now comprises:

1. A Flutter/Node/React framework
2. Stripe for payments
3. Airtable databases
4. Security integrations
5. Google Analytics 

Technical/platform development is an area our group is not as familiar with at the moment, so we are in the midst of looking for coding and web development mentorship and support so we can bring our MVP to greater heights, and actually develop it into a user-friendly platform.

As we are still in the prototyping stage, we do not currently serve the market yet. 

We plan to launch our MVP in February this year for a 6-month pilot-programme, after we have done more outreach and secured at least 3 social enterprises, 100 tertiary students and 1 tertiary institution in our user base.
(In the case that we do successfully onboard 1 tertiary institution and have them subscribe to the Institutions package, the number of tertiary students we will serve in that year will rise exponentially from 100 to 1500 students and beyond).

In the next 1 year after launch, we hope to be able to serve a total of 10 social enterprises, 1000 tertiary students and 3 tertiary institutions.
(In the case that we do successfully onboard 3 tertiary institutions as customers, the number of tertiary students we will serve in the 5 years will also increase to at least 4500 students).

However, in the next 5 years, we are aiming for a regular year over year expansion of 20% of our market share.

1. Social goals:
   1. Achieve SDGs 8, 9 & 17 with Changemaking.
   2. Empower sustainability-focused social enterprises to achieve the SDGs (especially 2, 6, 7, 11, 12, 13, 14 & 15).
   3. Enable sustainability-focused social enterprises to reach new frontiers of innovation in the food waste management, agritech and sustainability industries with outsourcing.
   4. Enable Singaporean students to enhance their future-preparedness and hard and soft skills portfolio by taking on packages of short skill-based tasks and working and partnering with sustainability-focused social enterprises.
   5. Decrease the rate of unemployment in newly-graduated tertiary students in Singapore.
   6. Solve these problems:

      

1. For our general growth goals, check our pitch video's growth plan section:

   
   
   

2. Pilot Programme:
   1. Serve at least 3 social enterprises, 100 tertiary students and 1 tertiary institution for 6 months from February onwards.
   2. Enable social enterprises to outsource at least 50 tasks to the students
   3. Make at least 20 task-student matches each for the Novice and Skilled students.
   4. Getting validated by actual student users and launching our MVP to Y4 (soon-to-be Y5) students in our school from this to next year.
      
3. Social Enterprises
   1. Group tasks that tap on the same skillset/are related to the same kinds of industry innovations into task packages, to enhance the number of tasking opportunities for students who take on these tasks.

1. Technical Barriers (1st priority):
   1. Lack of intermediate text-based coding knowledge.
   2. Lack of knowledge of Google Analytics.
   3. Lack of knowledge of website hosting, web domains and other website-related skills necessary to run a web platform.
   4. Lack of knowledge of what's required for website maintenance.
      
2. Financial Barriers:
   1. Lack of enough finances to finance website development courses, web hosting, web domain, integration costs, various platform costs and other costs of product development.
   2. Need for verification of viability of business model (so far, we have gotten positive feedback from our previous mentors on our model's financial sustainability, however, we have yet to test out our hypothesis as we haven't launched yet)
      
3. Business Difficulties:
   1. Lack of experience in creating business models.
   2. Lack of experience in running a business.
   3. Lack of networks and contacts for major outreach efforts
   4. Chicken-and-egg problem.
   5. Partnerships.
      
4. Cultural Barriers:
   1. Students preferring "traditional" internships over task-based internships and outsourcing. 
   2. Businesses preferring to partner with more established platforms.
   3. Businesses worrying about our quality control.

The above impediments to our success have been listed in order of priority, and with some mentorship, financial support and network/contact help, our team believes that we will be able to tackle these challenges efficiently and ensure the sustainability, impact and profitability of Changemaking.

Regarding the focus on tertiary students and skill-based tasking for students, all three of us are currently secondary school students, who will be entering a tertiary institution next year, which gives us a natural understanding of the career-guidance, mentorship and internship needs of (tertiary) students. At the same time, through conversations with our seniors and talks by ECG counsellors and teachers, we've come to understand the problem of a lack of real-world, short-term-skill-based-internships more thoroughly.

As for the sustainability aspect, we've done detailed research on the trends in the sector, the 17-UN-SDGs, new developments in the sector, social enterprises that focus on sustainability in Singapore and other aspects of the sector in both the local/global contexts. At the same time, we are planning to do more market research by talking to actual industry professionals and sustainability-focused social enterprise owners. 

Meanwhile, as for our qualifications and roles:

1. Shared:
   1. Qualifications:
      1. A willingness to learn
      2. A passion for sustainability
      3. Project planning skills
      4. Pitching skills
      5. Design thinking skills
         
2. Giselle
   1. Qualifications:
      1. Ideation
      1. Business strategy development
      2. Basic Python knowledge
      3. Experience in no-code website development
      4. Basic experience in Google Analytics
   2. Roles:
      1. To work towards the direction and objectives of the company.
      2. To enhance the use-cases for our product.
      3. To plan the long-term goals of the company.
      4. To liaise with prospective partners.
         
3. Sam-I
   1. Qualifications:
      1. Financial research
      2. Market research
      3. Outreach skills (cold and warm contacting)
      4. Publicity material design skills
      5. UI/UX design skills
   2. Roles:
      1. To lead the daily operations of the company.
      2. To work with the team to act on input, be it qualitative or quantitative research.
      3. To liaise with our organisational customers.
         
4. Lakshana
   1. Qualifications:
      1. Basic Python knowledge
      2. Industry research
      3. Writing skills
      4. Editorial skills
      5. Social media management
      6. Outreach skills (cold and warm contacting)
   2. Roles:
      1. To head the platform development of our company.
      2. To ensure good UI/UX for the platform.
      3. To keep updated with new trends in the sustainability sector.

As of now, we are not currently partnering with any company or organisation, but after our outreach efforts, we have been contacted by a micro-learning course company, Answered (https://answered.sg), and are considering partnering with them in the future to provide micro-learning courses to our Novice users.

When we manage to onboard the tertiary institutions, we will be treating them as long-term partners rather than customers and will be maintaining constant contact with them, so as to best liaise with them and address their needs.

1. How we are qualified:
   1. Firstly, we have a strong focus on working with social enterprises in the sustainability sector, specifically in the agritech, food waste management and greentech industries.
   2. Secondly, we aim to leverage crowdsourcing to bring green innovation to new heights.
   3. Thirdly, through our upskilling-in-action programme, not only will we enable these green social enterprises to meet their social goals and the environment-related SDGs, we will also educate generations of students on environmental problems, climate change and such issues, and more importantly, teach them skills and give them ideas on ways to solve these issues, therefore, enabling them to become generations of Changemakers.
      
2. What we will do with The HP Girls Save The World Prize:
   1. If we are privileged enough to be selected to receive the Prize, we will use the prize money to do two main things:
      1. Cover the cost of MVP development of our platform (refer to section on business costs of Changemaking).
      2. Develop a sub-platform focused on open innovation to food waste management, agritech and greentech-related problems where our social enterprise customers can list down challenges and problems they have identified with regards to these industries, with tertiary students submitting solution proposals to combat these issues with innovative, science-backed and technically feasible solutions, which, if they get selected, will receive an amount of joint funds from the social enterprise and Changemaking, and mentorship from the social enterprise and us to develop the solution further.

1. How we are qualified:
   1. With our goal of empowering tertiary students and helping them with their future job prospects, we will also be helping the female population of tertiary students in Singapore with upskilling and future-readiness development.
   2. Apart from the above, we will also be increasing the involvement of females in STREAM sectors, due to our focus on social enterprises in the innovative sectors of agritech, food waste management and greentech.
      
      
2. How we will use the Prize:
   
   1. If we do get selected to receive the prize, we will be using the funds in two main ways:
      1. Cover the cost of MVP development of our platform (refer to section on business costs of Changemaking).
      2. Develop a sub-platform focused on upskilling females in rural communities in LDCs, that will:
         1. Include micro-learning courses on topics related to STREAM, food tech, agritech and greentech.
            
            1. These courses can even be downloaded as videos and etched on CDs to provide access to these courses to females with low-to-no access to the internet.
         2. Include a subsection, an open innovation platform where the locals of rural communities can submit/get help to type out and submit problems that they face in their daily life, with female kids and teenagers aged 10-18 years old submitting solution proposals to these issues, which, if they get selected, will receive an amount of from Changemaking, and mentorship from us to develop the solution further.
         3. Host crowdfunding campaigns in MDCs for female STREAM education in these rural communities.