CASE STUDY
Save the Children
Sparking innovation across borders with Save the Children
Challenge
Save the Children is the largest international NGO focused on child rights, seeking to accelerate progress for children. With more than 25,000 dedicated staff across more than 110 countries, the NGO responds rapidly to humanitarian emergencies, deliver innovative development programs and ensure children’s voices are heard through its advocacy and campaigning to build a better future for and with children.
Save the Children is always looking for innovative ways to ensure children’s voices are heard and their rights upheld. The innovation team set an ambitious goal of sparking innovation amongst all their global teams.
To ignite action and belief in innovation, Save the Children partnered with Prophet to develop impactful activation ideas and compelling signature stories to embed new ways of working within the organization.
Solutions
We embarked on a pro-bono engagement from our Singapore and Shanghai offices to help Save the Children ignite action and belief in innovation.
We first conducted desk research on best-in-class innovation initiatives in global organizations. Together, with the Save the Children team, we immersed ourselves in these inspirational analogs and co-created a series of impactful and cost-effective tactics that can engage global employees to embrace an innovation culture. Upon prioritization, we landed on three creative, yet cost-effective tactics to inspire and ritualize innovation:
- Innovation Safari: An immersive in-person or remote experience designed to spark curiosity and drive outside-in inspiration for new ways of working globally and locally.
- Kickstarter Toolkit: A gamified approach to spur innovation mindset and behaviors, while recognizing and rewarding successful behaviors.
- Failure Fridays: A ritualized platform to normalize failure as a learning opportunity, encouraging a risk-taking mindset across all levels.
The second approach focused on developing signature stories that can share the same language of what innovation means for Save the Children, as well as equipping the teams with actual knowledge and tools to maximize the impact. Using existing innovation case studies, we transformed them into authentic and engaging stories that are tangible yet emotional to connect with employees at varying levels across the organization, inspiring them with real-world impact of their work. We also developed a signature story playbook to provide Save the Children with clear guidance on how they can use these signatures stories across internal and external communications channels, to help innovators unlock the power of storytelling to drive innovation across the organization.
Results
Save the Children’s innovation team adopted the recommended activation tactics and is further advancing them to be implemented globally. They are also applying the signature story playbook so that these innovation signature stories can be impactful in driving innovation across different levels of the organization.
“Working with the team was an absolute pleasure. They put in a lot of effort beforehand to ensure we got the most out of the day, and it paid off. Their creative solutions were perfectly aligned with our needs, and the entire session was not only fun but also incredibly productive. I loved the variety of ideas they introduced, and I was especially impressed by how quickly they turned those ideas into concrete, actionable results.”
Armando Munoz
Executive Director