Making the Most of our Women and Gender Equality Canada Grant
It’s been a year since Bridge School received the Women and Gender Equality Canada grant. We wanted to share with you some of the ways this grant enabled us to build our capacity to serve our amazing community. Over the past five years, Bridge has grown into a thriving organization, but we’ve spent most of our time focused on providing and improving our programming. Until now, we haven’t had the funding or time to focus on the mountains of work that makes a non-profit run. Having this grant has allowed us to focus on areas where we knew our organization could grow to serve more people. Specifically, we knew we could build out our strategic planning and fundraising efforts, as well as improving on our marketing and branding.
With this in mind, the best place to start was to create a strategic plan. With the help of Monica Chohan, an experienced facilitator and strategic planning professional, the executive team focused on creating a plan that would guide the organization for the next three years. As part of this work, we adopted a new vision statement that reflects our commitment to systemic change in the tech community. We’re currently working on creating a shareable version of our 2020–2023 Strategic Report that we expect to be able to release soon.
Out of our strategic planning sessions we identified that we wanted to focus on developing our fundraising capacity. We’ve had wonderful support from our existing partners, and we wanted to ensure that those partners were getting the most from us, and that we could build on that momentum. We hired The Good Partnership, who specializes in helping small nonprofits grow their fundraising. Since starting work with the Good Partnership, we’ve developed a scalable menu for partnership and developed processes to increase our ability to provide value to our partners while continuing to provide support to our community. In the last year, we’ve received funding from five new partners and renewed two existing partnerships. With the help of The Good Partnership, we are also building out a three year fundraising plan that will help us grow Bridge as an organization as well as help us deliver on our strategic mandate.
“Bridge has an exceptional community and we’ve seen people and companies really step up to support this important work. We know this foundational work will set Bridge up for continued growth and impact.”
~Cindy Wagman, President and CEO, The Good Partnership
Lastly, we wanted to utilize the grant to get clarity on how to promote Bridge and we needed to make sure that that aligned with the strategic roadmap we laid out. Most pressing was to take a look at all the data we’d collected from our student surveys to see what impact we were having on our community. We were thrilled to see that approximately 76% of Bridge graduates were getting new jobs upon graduation. This was just one of the key findings that you can see in our 2019–2020 Impact Report. As part of this project, we spent time defining what the Bridge style branding looked like and sounded like, ultimately producing the new Bridge School Brand Guidelines. As we move forward into the second year of our grant, we’re working away on a Marketing and Communication strategy as well as a super cool video that answers the question “What is Bridge?”.
This grant allowed us to spend some money on publicity and promotion. The Bridge team makes it a priority to get involved with community events. In order to support this we needed some swag to help spread our vision. We produced a marketing one-sheet and purchased Bridge t-shirts and stickers for the students to help enhance that community feeling of belonging.
We set out with the intention to build Bridge’s capacity as much as possible with this grant, and in our first year we have accomplished so much! We’re looking forward to the next three years where we can put into action even more of our capacity building plans, resulting in a greatly increased ability to provide value and support to our partner organizations and the community that we serve. We can’t wait to share more of our journey with you.
