CLIENT: Agora Partnerships

DATES: March 2018 - December 2018

COMPANY
Agora Partnerships is a pioneering international organization accelerating the shift towards a more sustainable and equitable world through the visionary impact entrepreneurs it supports. Agora equips entrepreneurs with the knowledge, tools and networks needed for the next level of growth.

CHALLENGE
Agora’s brief stipulated the re-design of its flagship accelerator model to meet new funding realities and the shifting accelerator landscape. After three years of donor-based financing, the model could no longer rely wholly on grants and instead had to shift to a more sustainable model that better addressed the needs of Latin American entrepreneurs in an increasingly competitive marketplace.

APPROACH
Given the team’s deep knowledge of the entrepreneurial ecosystem in Latin America, only light market research and regional stakeholder mapping were conducted to kick off the project. In the first full phase of the project, I created a series of customer personas derived from organizational data and one-on-one interviews with dozens of entrepreneurs who had either passed through an Agora program or who had no affiliation.

We used the customer personas to facilitate a full day team ideation session against a design brief that called for a more efficient program offering. The ideas were frameworked using clustering and tension plotting to find the best combination of potential options to explore.

Storyboards and customer journeys (5 E’s) for principal stakeholders were created for the most promising ideas. These assets were then used to draft a lean canvas of each idea including Key questions, key needs, must haves, nice-to-haves, general cost and revenue structures and a rough implementation timeline.

The most promising and sustainable re-structuring ideas passed to the prototyping phase where we created medium fidelity prototypes of program websites. Landing pages and website were tested with end users via individual feedback sessions and Facebook ads smoke testing.

We used these data to focus on the prototype with the most traction, parlaying it into a higher fidelity product with accompanying theory of change and key performance indicators for ease of tracking later down the line.

Throughout this project, I engaged in individual and group team calls as well as co-creation sessions to respond to wariness of change on the part of some key team members.

RESULTS
This project resulted in the creation of a new competitive 3-stage acceleration program that allowed Agora to increase both its breadth and depth of impact. The three stages included a series of theme-specific 3-day bootcamps, targeted 1:1 consulting services mostly focused on financial modeling, and access to capital raise products and services. The program was successfully piloted in Chile in early 2019 with subsequent planned full or partial cycles in Peru, Ecuador and Chile throughout 2019. The restructured program covers 27% to 37% of costs via direct earned income in years 1 to 3 respectively vs. the 14% that the old structure covered.

LESSONS LEARNT
Although team members were involved in most stages of this project, internal culture challenges necessitated much more 1:1 communication than previously anticipated. These challenges were mitigated with frequent meetings and calls but more padding time will be included in the next project to ensure it is on track.