We Are PoWEr
We Are PoWEr (WareP) is an organisation on a mission to advance gender equality, equity, and inclusion across the North, and beyond. Through their impactful mentoring programme, they connect mentors and mentees (predominantly women), provide tailored support, development opportunities, and professional connections to drive career and personal growth.
CHALLENGE
Beyond traditional mentoring, the WareP programme creates structured pathways for long-term success. As the programme expands, WareP is exploring innovative ways to enhance efficiency and accessibility while maintaining the personal connections that make its approach effective.
The current matchmaking process is managed manually using algorithms plus a human element, requiring significant time and effort to ensure impactful mentor-mentee pairings. To streamline this, WareP wanted to explore the option to develop a bespoke app to digitise and enhance matchmaking. With this vision, they sought expert guidance from the VEC to refine its functionality and explore its full potential and possible design features.
SOLUTION
The VEC, the lead partner for the Horizons project, ran a creative workshop to explore the We Are PoWEr business model and objectives in addition to the needed functionalities of an app.
Investigations helped to gain a clearer insight into the existing market landscape and current trends within their industry and technology utilised to identify any commonalities. We Are PoWEr gained a greater understanding of how variations of technology adoption could support the functionality part of the business, including offering additional online resources such as blogs and video assets.
The VEC delivered a bespoke workshop to discuss and explore the different functionalities of an app, creating a visual wireframe to showcase what this innovation could look like. Looking at the team’s existing back pages, the team could demonstrate every step needed for a smooth implementation of an app onto their existing systems to eliminate disruption to their workflows.
IMPACT
The VEC created and developed a working prototype front-end wireframe for We Are PoWEr to have an all-inclusive app with 6 pages to illustrate what it could look like, and the potential functionality based on their objectives and customer needs. This included capturing and showcasing the learning achievements of each user, tailored to each app user for enhanced experience whilst We Are PoWEr gains a greater overlook of their database and users.
A knowledge transfer session focused on the architecture for how they could seamlessly feed their existing website data into the app and what editions they could make in the future. These demonstrations using the working prototype brought the team’s vision to life. The ability to make edits and adjustments in real-time was integral to a thorough testing and learning process, allowing the team to identify potential areas for growth.
Finally, the VEC highlighted We Are PoWEr as a potential source for future funding opportunities. This support would enable their teams to continue developing the app by dividing the project into phases to create manageable and realistic workflows.
Click here for the downloadable case study.
