MTM Empowering Girls and Social Change in Liberia
In this report, we will feature our project with More than Me (MTM), an organization empowering girls and social change in Liberia.
The past few months have been exciting for us as our teams in Washington DC, Pittsburgh, Los Angeles and San Francisco have completed projects and started the strategic planning process for the upcoming year.
We were also excited to have Katie Meyler as a guest speaker earlier this month. Katie is the Founder of More than Me. She shared her story and the story of MTM with us as well as tips on how we can stay close to our passion and better support our partners.
Featured Project
Today Liberia’s education system is in a state of emergency with approximately 65% of primary school age children out of school. More than half of young people aged 15-24 are illiterate and approximately 73% of all women and girls are illiterate. Nearly 50% of the youth population in Africa is either unemployed or inactive [1].
More than Me is addressing this challenge by focusing on several different activities: 1. MTM Academy, a tuition free, K-6 girls school providing high quality education and wrap around services e.g., healthcare, family planning. 2. Public school support, working with the Ministry of Education to ensure all children in Liberia have access to a safe, holistic education, 3. Systemic change, actively working to drive systemic and lasting change that improves Liberia’s education system.
Our DSO project team (Amir, Anusha, Bian, Chung-Yan, Hannah, Joshua, Mark, Rosie, Sean) consisted of Stanford Students and professionals from San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Seattle. The objective of the project was to identify and test how to optimally position MTM’s social and web strategy to increase its digital presence, deepen engagement with its audience, and increase awareness of MTM’s powerful mission in Liberia.
For each platform, DSO measured MTM’s current baseline, compared that to other nonprofits, researched best practices, and determined MTM-specific recommendations to improve MTM’s digital marketing efforts across several channels: website, Facebook, Twitter, Newsletter, and Instagram. The end recommendations included some low-hanging fruit recommendations as well as recommendations that would require iterative A/B testing. The A/B testing methodology will help MTM become more agile and allow for faster digital marketing improvement based on data from their desired audiences.