Gen Squeeze: Ethelo Drives Member Impact
Following its mandate to advocate for the interests of millennials, GenSqueeze needed to shortlist between 36 initiatives popular among its members. The organization needed a platform that would allow not only to vote on what was important to them, but also to add comments and build on other people’s thoughts. The process needed to be transparent and guarantee that constituents felt truly heard.
400
participants
36 potential
initiatives
Vancity Mentor
The Millennial generation is on a tight budget: housing prices have skyrocketed, career opportunities are increasingly competitive, and healthy food is hard to find. In pursuit of its mandate, GenSqueeze needed to distill and then shortlist from among 36 initiatives popular amongst its constituents. These included such items as life insurance, car shares, child care, and health assistance.
Following several focus groups where initial possibilities were identified, GenSqueeze used Ethelo to extend the conversation to its 25,000 members. During a two-week period, the platform was open to public voting, allowing more than 400 participants to have their say and propose additional suggestions. In this case, the response rate to invitations was 30%.
With limited staff and resources, GenSqueeze needed to move beyond “nice-to-haves” to pragmatic offerings with maximum member impact. For this purpose, each of the 36 potential initiatives was assigned a certain amount of “effort units” based on the amount of human and capital resources required to bring it into action. GenSqueeze staff determined that they had a maximum organizational capacity of 30 “effort units” to expend on realizing any package of initiatives.
Ethelo’s algorithm was deployed to find the overlap between what members wanted, how much they wanted it, and what was actually feasible given GenSqueeze’s limited staff-time and budget. Once each option was assigned a level of staff effort, Ethelo applied the overarching “effort unit” constraint to shortlist the billions of theoretically possible benefit packages down to 126,000 practically actionable packages. These packages Ethelo then ordered from highest to lowest member popularity.
“Our group, Generation Squeeze, is a national lobby group for folks in their 40s and younger, and we operate with very few resources. This means it’s difficult for us to find the opportunities to dialogue about the important issues facing our constituents. Ethelo’s platform allowed our folks to not only vote on what was important to them, but also to add comments and build on other people’s thoughts. The transparency was appreciated and our constituents really felt heard.”
Erin Robinson
“Ethelo’s platform allowed our folks to not only vote on what was important to them, but also to add comments and build on other people’s thoughts. The transparency was appreciated and our constituents really felt heard.”
Erin Robinson
