AIESEC in Finland 13-14 OGX report

AIESEC in Finland 13-14 Outgoing Exchange Report

Nischal Sharma, Member Committee Vice President – Outgoing Exchange 13-14

AIESEC in Finland

E-mail: [email protected]

AIESEC in Finland 13-14 Outgoing Exchange Report | 2

Executive Summary Nischal Sharma was responsible for both the outgoing exchange programs (Global Internship Program and Global Community Development Program) for AIESEC-Suomi ry in the role as Vice President Outgoing Exchange. Key activities included process creation and implementation, partnership management with key entity partners, quality control and education to the local offices. In addition to this there were also responsibilities of product development and application management along with Camilla Petersen and that of job description creation and timeline alignment based on talent capacity with Olga Drochkova. The target for the term from 1st May, 2013 to 30th April was to successfully give 200 people from Finland the experience of taking up the Global Community Development Program and 53 people the experience of taking up the Global Internship Program. The Global Community Development program had increasingly become a priority over the Global Internship Program since the term 12-13 of AIESEC in Finland. This program was on the developing stage and also had been showing growth, thus it was decided that there would be a continued focus on this program for the term 13-14. The start of the term saw the early success coming in with the delivery of summer exchanges. Thanks to the contribution of term 12-13 AIESEC in Finland could surpass the number of exchanges achieved by the term 12-13 in the month of August, 2013. Another success that came in early was an in depth analysis of the outgoing Global Community Development Program that was conducted for the previous 15 years of AIESEC in Finland’s history. This analysis however was based on the internal data that could be retrieved from the myaiesec.net platform. The membership of AIESEC in Finland received education about the 11 different issues segmenting the Global Community Development Program and also started implementing the same in their operations. The International Congress 2013, Egypt saw the launch of the new product-customer flow which was a simple step-by step guide for planning and executing operations along with the back office for all the exchange areas. The membership of AIESEC in Finland received education about the same leading to a knowledge base to carry out the whole exchange process. The outgoing Global Community Development Program was also benefited from the back office support of Marketing, Talent Management and External Relations departments. While working closely with Marketing the brand of Global Citizen evolved along with a new website, Talent Management on the other hand played a key role in the creation of standard job descriptions for the membership as well as the implementation of the new project based structure. External Relations contributed by initiating new partnerships with companies like KILROY/ISIC and ITIM. These partnerships benefited the operations and are also promising for the future. While the partnership with TCS is promising to contribute to the outgoing Global Internship Program, the Youth to Business Forum offered a big platform to get the word out about the Global Community Development Program. However there were also a few challenges faced by this program. Marketing of the program could not be the most efficient with the lack of availability of professional graphical designers. A strong point to be noted was that there was a gap between the customer’s buying time and AIESEC in Finland’s selling time of the outgoing Global Community Development Program. Realizing the potential threat of this challenge, together


with the Talent Management and Marketing departments a new timeline was created which would ensure to meet the demands of the external market with regards to time. For most of the term the focus was to partner with and promote 5 countries which were Brazil, Mexico, Uganda, Togo and Indonesia. Also the focus was to promote 4 issues that being Literacy, Health and Lifestyle, Environment and Economic Growth. After the winter peak analysis it was realized that managing 5 entities and 4 issues was above and beyond the capacity of AIESEC in Finland and also was a bottleneck in attracting the right customers towards the program. In March 2014 along with the democratic decision from the plenary 3 new countries (Colombia, Philippines and Kenya) and 2 issues (Literacy and Environment) were decided to be the only focuses for 2014. Managing the applications received for this program was a challenge for most of the year mainly because of the diversity of the different platforms used. Conversion rates from applications to raises were affected because of this and other inefficiencies in the process. In March 2014 it was decided to shift to using a single platform for all applications. Also later in the term an interview guide was created to make the process more efficient. The focus on the Global Community Development Program also resulted in ignorance towards to Global Internship Program. This was visible in the results as AIESEC in Finland dropped by 12% in realizations in its outgoing Global Internship Program for the term 13-14. Overall it was a successful year for the outgoing Global Community Development Program, although the initially decided target was not reached the program still managed to grow by 15% in Raises, 37% in Matches and 60% in Realizations.


CONTENTS

Executive Summary 2

Historical Data 5

Product Customer Flow 9

The Nordic Cooperation and Entity Partnerships 9

Quality 10

Local Committee Contribution 12

Entities 14

Issues 15

Application Management 16

Pipeline and Conclusion 17

Global Internship Program 20


Historical Data An in depth analysis of the outgoing Global Community Development Program was conducted for the previous 15 years of AIESEC in Finland’s history. This analysis however was based on the internal data that could be retrieved from the myaiesec.net platform. This analysis included countries to which the exchange participants went, the issues that they worked on, the local committee they belonged to and their study background. Also there was a study of raises, matches and realizations over the years. The graphs can be found below for further reference. All graphs presented before are only for the outgoing Global Community Development Program from May 1998 until April 2013.

Progression

The following graph shows the trends of Raises, Matches and Realizations for AIESEC in Finland throughout the several years.


Study Fields

The following graph shows the contribution of different study fields to the exchanges of AIESEC in Finland.


Entities

The following graph shows the distribution of countries of the outgoing GCDP exchanges done by AIESEC in Finland throughout the years.

Issues

In the following graph shows the distribution of exchanges based on different issues throughout the years for AIESEC in Finland.


Local Committee Performance

The following graph shows the contribution of different local committees to the exchanges throughout the years.


Product Customer Flow

The product-customer flow is a simple step-by step guide for planning and executing operations along with the back office for all the exchange areas. The membership of AIESEC in Finland received education about the same leading to a knowledge base to carry out the whole exchange process. The product customer flow specifically was important in coordinating processes between the outgoing exchange and marketing departments.

The Nordic Cooperation and Entity Partnerships

These countries were Indonesia, Mexico, Brazil and Uganda. At International Congress 2013 in Egypt all The Nordic Region had successful meetings with the mentioned countries and it was decided to take the partnership ahead. An increasing demand of French speaking African countries also led to the addition of Togo to the list of partner entities for AIESEC in Finland. However this entity was not a part of the whole Nordic Region Partnership.

The AIESEC entities of Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Iceland and Finland had been cooperating together as The Nordic Region for several years. The considerable amount of similarities in the external market gave base to this cooperation. In July 2013, a Nordic Summit was held in Oslo. All the outgoing exchange responsible Member Committee members got together to discuss operations and support towards the cooperation. AIESEC in Finland streamlined on 4 countries to partner with along with the rest of the Nordic Countries.


However the major challenges faced with these partnerships were the lack of clarity in the delivery of the partnership. Additionally promotion of all 5 countries along with the 4 issues of Literacy, Economic Growth, Environment and Health led to lack of clarity in the message finally resulting in ineffectiveness to attract the right customers. Lastly managing 5 countries and 4 issues demanded a more capacity than actually available. In March 2014 along with the democratic decision from the plenary 3 new countries (Colombia, Philippines and Kenya) and 2 issues (Literacy and Environment) were decided to be the only focuses for 2014.

Quality

AIESEC in Finland used the global tool of customer gauge and net promoters score to measure the quality of experiences being provided to the customers. In August 2013 the plenary of AIESEC in Finland was provided with the tools and knowledge to use this system and measure quality of exchanges. The system not only tells about the current experiences but also recommends modification in operations in order to improve the future experiences. This system was implemented in September 2012 and based on data since then the outgoing Global Community Development Program

increased in the total number of response from customers leading to an increase in all 3 categories Promoters, Passives and Detractors while transitioning from the term 12-13 to the term 13-14. There wasn’t any considerable improvement in quality as the NPS of this program moved from 6 in the term 12 – 13 to 8 in the term 13 -14


Below is the graph comparing the data from the 2 terms:

Below is the graph showing the distribution of countries based on the quality of experience they provided to all exchange participants of AIESEC in Finland (both programs). Only countries which received a minimum of 3 responses have been considered in this graph.


However as a positive conclusion it can be noticed that there was personal development experienced by the exchange participants of the Global Community Development Program. Below are some comments received from them:

Local Committee Contribution In the term 2013 – 2014 AIESEC in Finland had 8 Local Committees, 1 Expansion and 1 Specialized Unit. However almost 90% of the results in the Global Community Development Program came from just 5 Local Committees, with AIESEC Jyväskylä contributing to 30% of the results. It could be concluded from this that there is dependency on certain local committees with regards to results. There is market potential in most of the local committees to contribute to this program. Below are a set of graphs which are showing the individual contribution of Local Committees towards the outgoing Global Community Development Program.


Below is a graph showing LC contribution for RAISES:

Below is a graph showing LC contribution for Matches:


Below is a graph showing LC contribution for Realizations:

Entities

In the term 2013-2014 the entities with which AIESEC in Finland did exchanges in the outgoing Global Community Development Program were quite widespread. A total of 59 exchange participants were sent across 30 different countries, with an average of 2 exchange participants per country. Hence what could be concluded is that even though there were entity partnerships there was not too much focus on the benefits an exchange participant gets from going to a partner entity. This led to exchange participants being matched to the different entities. The highest contribution was to Indonesia, China, Taiwan, India and Kenya. A total of 37% exchange participants were sent only to these entities. Of these only Indonesia and Kenya were partners during the term 2013 – 2014. The following graph shows the distribution of the Global Community Development Program exchanges based on the different entities:


Issues In the term 2013-2014 a total of 59 exchange participants worked on 8 different issues out of the 11 different issues the Global Community Development Program offers. The start of the term was focused on 5 issues Literacy, Career Development, Economic Growth, Environment and Health and Lifestyle. As mentioned previously in March 2014 Literacy and Environment were decided to be the only two focus issues. The highest contribution was for the issue of Cultural Understanding with 36% exchange participants who worked on this issue. Cultural Understanding not being the focus program still was the highest contributor because of the high availability of projects under this issue. Economic growth, Literacy and Environment shared almost 40%


of the results and based on relevance and availability Literacy and Environment were chosen to be the focus issues. The following graph shows the distribution of the Global Community Development Program exchanges based on the different issues:

Application Management

implemented to direct the applications received at the Global Online Registration System to PODIO. This led to having multiple platforms being used for managing applications. In general the process from the point of application to the point of an exchange participant being raised on system was quite slow.

The start of the term it was decided that PODIO would be the tool used to manage applications. All the people interested in the program applied to a link which stored the applications in PODIO. However there was no process


Pipeline and Conclusion Considering the external realities of AIESEC in Finland majority of the exchanges take place in the summer months. AIESEC in Finland changes term in the month of May; this leads to the last months of the closing term to be crucial for ensuring significant results for the next term. Below are a few graphs to compare the results throughout the year.

Raises

This combined with the challenge of multiple platforms resulted in low conversion rates throughout the year, the conversion from the point of application to the point of the person being raised on system was between 10 – 20% throughout the year. The lack of resources to manage the high number of Entity partners and Issues in the initial part of the term further contributed to not being able to attract the right customers and thus a low conversion rate.

After much analysis, in March, 2014 it was decided to reduce the entity partners and issues and also it was decided to use a single platform for application management. Later in the year also an interview guide was created to facilitate a more efficient process in converting the received applications.


In terms of Raises, AIESEC in Finland had a growth of 15% in the term 2013-14. There was significant contribution from the previous term. From March 2013 a good amount of Raises kept coming in which continued to add to the raises of the term 2013-14 for the months of May, June and July. However what can be seen from the graph is that from March 2014 there could not be significant amount of raises which also affected the term 2014-15 in the months of May, June and July as the expected results did not come in. A change in the entity partners and issues in March, 2014 led to a time gap of adapting to the changes and hence certain processes were delayed which finally affected results.

Matches

In terms of Matches, AIESEC in Finland had a growth of 37% in the term 2013-14. There was significant contribution from the previous term in terms of Raises which contributed to the high matching amounts in the months of May and June in 2013. The less amount of Raises for the Summer of 2014 meant that they were matched in the months of April, May and June leaving July and August with no results.


Realizations

In terms of Realizations, AIESEC in Finland had a growth of 60% in the term 2013-14. There was significant contribution from the previous term in terms of Raises and Matches which led majority of the results coming in the months of May, June, July and August. The in general lack of pipeline for the term 14-15 and there being less number of Raises did not yield expected results for the months of May, June and July for 2014.

Conclusion

The general conclusion for this analysis is that for the reality of AIESEC in Finland, the months in summer are most important in terms of results for the Outgoing Exchange area. A high amount of resources should be invested for bringing results at this time. It is also seen that the results in this time are very dependent on the promotions and marketing of the product during the right times. As in the term 12-13 we could see there was a strong contribution which ensured continued results even after the change in term. While in the term 13-14 due to various factors including the change in a lot of processes the results of the summer months did not turn out to be as expected. Looking into numbers there is not a big difference in the transfer of terms, number of matches transferred from term 12-13 to 13-14 was 11 and from term 13-14 to 14-15 was 10 but not enough Raises coming in as results has been the main concern. The month of March is crucial for providing results for the months ahead. This can be kept in mind for the upcoming years to ensure sustainability and also so that AIESEC in Finland can capitalize on the big advantage that comes from the summer months.


Global Internship Program

As mentioned previously the Global Internship Program for the Outgoing Exchange area was not a focus area for the term 13-14. The national board was responsible for approving the profiles of the exchange participants. This was done because of the low conversion rate from Raises to Matches. It did help as the conversion rate increased from 37% to 51% in the term 13-14. However because of no focus on the program there was a decrease of 12% in the overall results.

AIESEC in Finland 13-14 OGX report

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