Excellence in Community Service recognizes vendors that have provided significant investment of company resources and time in support of a community service project or initiative.
GOLD
SweetRush Inc.
For more than a century, the American Association of University Women has been working to close the gender pay gap in the U.S. Five years ago, they began hosting Work Smart workshops, in which women are taught to understand their own value and learn salary negotiation skills.
AAUW felt they were reaching thousands of women with these workshops, but they wanted to be reaching millions. They decided to adapt the workshop into an e-learning format, but they needed a partner to help see the idea through. That’s when AAUW discovered SweetRush Inc.
Since 2001, SweetRush has been helping businesses create custom online training and e-learning solutions that help drive talent engagement and success.
SweetRush allowed AAUW to turn their workshops into a free, learner-centric experience using storytelling, live and interactive video scenarios featuring a “diverse and relatable cast of women,” interactive learning components, and self-reflection and assessment. So far, more than 10,000 women have registered for the course, reviews for which have been consistently positive. AAUW plans to have 10 million women trained on salary negotiation through Work Smart Online by 2022.
SILVER
D2L
After many years working to support different humanitarian aid initiatives, ICF needed to refresh its training courses to meet the needs of volunteers being deployed to humanitarian aid organizations across Europe. The organization realized the training was often a stumbling block for aid organizations, in particular when it’s actually time to respond to a disaster.
ICF began contemplating solutions and decided that a learning management system platform would be the best tool for what they wanted to accomplish, which was a fully designed and improved course with streamlined course administration.
They discovered a flexible, customizable platform in D2L’s Brightspace. ICF worked closely with various European aid organizations to learn about project management, intercultural awareness, safety and security, advocacy and communications, as well as psychological first aid, in order to develop 12 course modules.
With D2L, ICF is able to provide knowledge and support to humanitarian aid volunteers across Europe, including those who volunteer through the EU Aid Volunteers initiative. In the less than three years since the launch of their new training program, ICF and its partners completed 14 training cycles. In a survey done, 90 percent of individuals surveyed gave the course the highest possible approval score.
