Acumen Training: On-Demand Courses for Busy Professionals

+Acumen is excited to offer On Demand courses to reach busy professionals in the social sector.  These courses feature playbooks, tutorials and hands-on activities for participants to access and complete at their own pace.  The On Demand courses are supplemented by social learning elements including pop-up office hours, facilitated discussion forums, peer feedback sessions, and live tutorials from leading practitioners.

Creating a Community of Practice and Expertise

With the On Demand courses, +Acumen’s goal is to equip a global community of change makers with accessible resources to help them change the way the world tackles poverty. In one of the courses, Market Analysis at the Bottom of the Pyramid, +Acumen offers busy professionals in the social sector opportunities to gain financial expertise in partnership with the Grameen Foundation.

“Building an online course with +Acumen allowed us to train hundreds of organizations on new material at no cost to them. The PPI has often been used simply to report poverty outreach, but with this course, we were able to show just how much an organization can do with objective poverty data.” – Frank Ballard, Grameen Foundation 

Catalogue: +Acumen On Demand Courses

The +Acumen On Demand courses are available for participants to join anytime before the course closure date.  Participants can choose to take the course as an individual, supplemented by opportunities for social learning, or as a team. The materials can be accessed at any time and do not need to be completed in one sitting.

Scaling Smart: Developing Repeatable Models® to Scale Your Impact was developed by +Acumen in partnership with Bain & Company.  The course builds upon Bain’s experience working with high-performing companies like IKEA and LEGO across a range of industries and countries for decades.  It is designed to help non-profits and social enterprises apply the Repeatable Models® Framework to scale their own work across geographies, products, or customer segments. Open through May 25

Market Analysis at the Bottom of the Pyramid is built around a tutorial on how to segment your market. The course is designed to help social sector organizations better target the poorest customers in sophisticated and responsive ways.  The course included a Q&A session with a data scientist from Grameen Foundation where participants from Senegal, Malawi, Vietnam and India, among other places, posed questions about how to make their products and services more relevant to Bottom of the Pyramid customers. Open through May 12

Acumen’s Lean Data initiative led it to be named as one of Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies in 2014. This course offers participants an introduction to how to gather important data to measure their impact in ways that are streamlined and efficient, including using new mobile tools and smarter surveys.  The course has been completed by individuals and teams from some of the leading governmental, philanthropic, and non-profit organizations including Kiva, USAID, the United Nations Development Program, UNICEF, and Ashoka. Open through June 3

Team Story: One Acre Fund takes On Demand course to support farmers in East Africa

A team based at the One Acre Fund headquarters in Bungoma, Kenya completed the Scaling Smart course on NovoEd.  One Acre Fund (OAF) is a nonprofit organization supporting smallholder farmers in East Africa.  It provides farmers with seeds and other agricultural inputs; offers training; and facilitates harvest sales. OAF began operations in Kenya in 2006 and has expanded to Rwanda (2007), Burundi (2012) and Tanzania (2013). By 2013, it was serving 130,000 farmers operating on more than 87,000 acres and is widely recognized in the social enterprise field as one of the most successful agricultural firms to bring its concept to scale.

As part of the course, Carla Pellegrini, a Program Associate for Systems and Logistics at One Acre Fund and Jake Winn, a Program Associate for Field Operations jointly completed the interactive brainstorm and core mapping exercise to help them plot future growth trajectories for the organization.  “The Repeatable Models idea is very relevant to One Acre Fund and how we are currently growing and provides some key insights into what we need to be aware of in order to scale smartly,” said Carla.  Jake added, “The exercises were simple, but allowed you to play the lessons to your own work in a clear and quick way. The fact that it was fast and reflective made it something I would absolutely suggest to colleagues.”

Questions?

To learn more about +Acumen or their On Demand courses please visit the +Acumen website at http://plusacumen.org/courses/

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