Helping a STEAM Organization Expand Into Additional Charlotte-Mecklenburg Title I Schools

Our Experts Help a Nonprofit Utilize Data for More Effective Corporate Engagement and Improved Reporting

Digi-Bridge is a Charlotte-based nonprofit organization that provides technology-based, hands-on STEAM experiences to students in partner Title 1 Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools (“CMS”)

Situation

FTI Consulting partnered with Digi-Bridge, a nonprofit organization that aims to spark interest and passion in science, technology, engineering, arts and math (“STEAM”) learning to ensure that students have the opportunities and skills to succeed. Our assignment included developing a standard set of environmental, social and governance (“ESG”) metrics that could be provided to corporate donors and improving Digi-Bridge’s forecasting capabilities to assist with program expansion.

Through collaboration and interviews with selected corporate donors, FTI Consulting gained an understanding of valuable ESG reporting metrics. Our team then worked with Digi-Bridge to identify required collectable data that was fed into a customizable ESG reporting dashboard (Power BI).

Our Role

FTI Consulting contributed more than 750 pro bono hours meeting with stakeholders and corporate partners; cleaning and standardizing data; and transforming the data into a meaningful format
Our pro bono team assessed Digi-Bridge’s data landscape to identify environmental, social and governance information that can be used in reporting to key donors and stakeholders
We built a Power BI dashboard featuring ESG KPIs that can be used for tracking company goals and disclosing important metrics to stakeholders
Our team interviewed key corporate donors to better understand the insights they were expecting from DigiBridge, which helped us create a disclosure framework and an ESG strategy with short-, medium- and long-term action items
We created a dynamic cost-to-serve forecast model that provides visibility into future revenue and expense activity
Our team led discussions with Digi-Bridge leadership to build a bottoms-up forecast of program level expenses and expenditures that can be used to anticipate school and program growth
We provided the Digi-Bridge team with a complete step-by-step user guide for updating the cost-to-serve forecast model

“Working with FTI Consulting was an incredible experience, their high level of expertise helped Digi-Bridge to pave a path for nonprofit ESG reporting ultimately helping us to become a stronger and more impactful organization.” — Alyssa Sharpe, CEO at Digi-Bridge

Our Impact

FTI Consulting provided Digi-Bridge comprehensive guidance on the major ESG themes, including recommendations to be executed in the short-, medium-, and long term. Additionally, presented a go-forward ESG strategy to ensure the continued implementation of sustainable and responsible practices.

Our team delivered Digi-Bridge its first dynamic ESG dashboard capable of displaying a variety of metrics to track progress towards their ESG goals, accompanied by a training session, data improvement recommendations and a dashboard manual for future updates.

We provided Digi-Bridge with a dynamic cost-to-serve model template to forecast expenses at the program level, which can be leveraged for budgeting and fundraising efforts.

FTI Consulting also worked with Digi-Bridge to develop a robust and dynamic revenue/expense forecast model template to expand the nonprofit’s forecasting capabilities. The model can be updated regularly and can be utilized to foresee upcoming opportunities to expand programs into new schools.