Cameroon Football Development Program
By Amy Badiani and Tanu Chellam (Project Leaders)
We wholeheartedly thank you for supporting Development Solutions Organization (DSO). With your generous donation, we succeeded in our Open Challenge and are now a proud permanent member of the GlobalGiving community!
Over the past year, we worked on 5 projects with 13 professional and 32 student volunteers. In this report we will feature our project with Cameroon Football Development Program (CFDP) and discuss DSO’s next steps.
Featured Project
One of the big events of the summer was the FIFA World Cup. Every four years, we are reminded that soccer can bring the world together (Around 3.5B watch soccer worldwide). Soccer’s coordinating power can be used to spark development and reduce cultural barriers between the developed and developing world. Our team combined our passion for soccer with our professional experience in marketing and branding to contribute to CFDP, a soccer-based social enterprise.
CFDP is a Pittsburgh and Cameroon based non-profit that uses a sports-centered approach to retain youth participation and create meaningful community change. CFDP achieves this by providing recreational activities, professional skills development and training to reduce delinquency, incidence of teenage pregnancy, and incidence of HIV/AIDS transmission. This year, our DSO project team, comprising students, mentoring professionals and Justin (CFDP’s Founder) provided several services to enable CFDP to share a compelling story with its supporters and donors around the world, including Search Engine Optimization, Google Analytics tracking; branding analysis based on Google Analytics results; internal and external communication plans; User Experience evaluation of CFDP’s website; and the implementation of these recommendations. CFDP accepts donations in the form of soccer equipment. The number of unique pageviews to this section of the site has increased by 97% over a period of six months. Overall, the results indicated an increase in donor engagement and a better experience for viewers of the CFDP website.
A testimonial from the Founder of CFDP
Working with DSO was a great pleasure and ultimately beneficial to the growth of our organization. Early on in the consulting engagement, DSO took time to get a deep understanding of operations and impact and provided an assessment of our value proposition and recommendations for improvement. From there, we worked together on an internal communications plan and talking points for volunteers to clearly communicate with the general public while representing the organization. As a result of the DSO’s recommendations, we increased traffic to our website and improved our ability to generate awareness and interest in our local community. All of this serves to enhance support of our development activities on the ground.
What’s next for DSO?
The summer is almost over and DSO’s student volunteers will be returning to their school campuses. DSO will be recruiting new student volunteers in the Bay Area, DC Area, and Pittsburgh in September and October. Our students will work with our professionals (13 returning and 3 new) on new projects. These projects will be highlighted in our next reports.
First look at the DSO team
Here’s a first look at our team’s shared passion for international development and what DSO means to us.
Sincerely,
DSO Team