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Back in October 2019, our graduates and Project Controls Academy (PCA) students entered the APMs Project Management Challenge to deliver their first-ever project.
This year’s challenge was to deliver outputs and benefits to a deserving charitable organisation, so i3Works teamed up with The Benjamin Pritchard Foundation (Be More Ben) for a six month project.
Ben was just eight years old when he died from a rare brain tumour. After Bens passing his parents, Sarah and Shane Pritchard, felt they didn’t get the support they needed, noticing that even fewer services were available for siblings, aunts, uncles and grandparents. In 2018, just a year after Ben’s death, Sarah and Shane founded The Benjamin Pritchard Foundation to ensure that families coming to terms with losing a child have access to support when they need it most.
To help spread awareness of the services offered by Be More Ben, and to fundraise, our grads and PCA students partnered with Be More Ben to host a month of Bake For Ben events throughout Bristol, and to transform management of the charity’s social media platforms. Specifically, the team designed and procured Bake For Ben fundraising packs, created a Bake For Ben webpage, provided training in social media management tools, analysed online engagement data, and produced a strategy for planning online content.
Due to the current Covid-19 situation, Bake For Ben events have been postponed, but the team hasn’t let a pandemic stop them from delivering. The team fulfilled their entire scope, and negotiated a staggering 54% discount on fundraising pack contents, delivering £462 below budget. The team also successfully transformed the way that Be More Ben manage their Facebook page, saving them time and enabling targeted use of online platforms to spread the word about their life-changing services.
Since their initial engagement with the charity in November, Be More Ben has increased followers of their Facebook page by an impressive 12%, compared to a 4% increase for the same period in the previous year.
Gregor Cameron, engagement director at i3Works, said: “Our team of first-time project managers, Chris Barnett, Sarah-Jane Firth, James Harris, Jameet Singh, and Natalie Talbot successfully delivered a great venture. Not only that, they delivered it on time, under budget, and exceeded the set quality. This is an enormous achievement for a team who have each been working in P3M for less than a year.
“The team responded to the Covid-19 changes with real agility and still managed to deliver measurable benefits by rapidly and collaboratively changing the deliverables to ensure that they were still able to meet their commitments. Through their perseverance, the team transformed Be More Ben’s social media management to save the charity time and enable online content to be targeted based on analytics. The fundraising pack designs created by the team can be adapted for any event, providing colourful and distinctively branded Be More Ben templates for future events. This is a remarkable achievement of which they should all be very proud.”
Sarah Pritchard, trustee at Be More Ben, said: “Working together with i3Works has been amazing; they have not only provided fantastic marketing packs for our bake-off events, but they have set a precedent for all our branding going forward. The support from everyone in the team has been fantastic and we are extremely grateful to have been given the opportunity to collaborate with them. “
Our grads and PCA students have provided a shining example of how to rise to a challenge as a team to provide great management, develop innovative ideas and deliver high-quality supporting materials. Most impressively, the team has demonstrated that what they start, they finish despite the impact of Covid-19 and being in the industry for just six months.
We are extremely proud of them all and what they have achieved – well done team.
