Boys and Girls Club of San Francisco

In May 2015, the San Francisco Oliver Wyman office began a second Social Impact project with the Boys and Girls Club of San Francisco (BGCSF). The BGCSF creates a safe environment for more than 17,000 children each year, often from underprivileged circumstances, to grow into productive, responsible, and compassionate citizens.

Scope

This six-month project consisted of three phases: benchmarking, building a framework, and the defining requirements for an online tool.

First, the case team assessed the BGCSF’s current learning and development programme and benchmarked their practices against other Boys and Girls Club organisations across the US. The team found that training courses were often provided on an ad-hoc basis, did not effectively use online tools, and were often disconnected to the professional development goals of the BGCSF staff. In the second phase of the project, the Oliver Wyman team built a framework for the BGCSF to prioritise their highest value courses. Staff time is a precious commodity, especially during the busy back-to-school months. Oliver Wyman worked with the BGCSF staff to decide what types of courses are most suitable to this crucial period. In the third and final stage of the project, Oliver Wyman built out the technical requirements for an online tool that will be able to assign training to employees and track their completion.

By helping the BGCSF build the tools they need to develop their staff into effective professionals, we are ultimately helping the BGCSF develop at-risk youth into responsible and well-rounded adults

Tyler Sullberg Oliver Wyman

Impact

Consistently tracking training courses allows the BGCSF to cross-reference this information with the performance of their employees and evaluate the effectiveness of each training course. Ultimately, this project will allow BGCSF to create a learning and development programme that is aligned to the needs and goals of their staff, and more importantly, the children they serve.

Despite having deep institutional knowledge about how to mentor children and young adults, the BGCSF had little standardised training content, no way of tracking completed courses, and no way of evaluating their effectiveness. That has impacted both the BGCSF’s ability to effectively deliver on its mission and its ability to retain talented staff. The BGCSF brought in Oliver Wyman to build a measurable, repeatable, and consistent learning and development framework.