Vodafone Turkey Foundation - Innovation in Non-Profit Organizations

Company: Vodafone Turkey Foundation, Istanbul, Turkey
Company Description: Being one of the 27 Vodafone Foundations in the world, the Vodafone Turkey Foundation has been committed to its mission of leading social change and development since 2007. Until now, 41 Million TL social investment was made by touching 4 Million lives.
Nomination Category: Company / Organization Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Award for Excellence in Innovation in Non-Profit Organizations or NGOs - Organizations with up to 100 Employees

Nomination Title: Vodafone Turkey Foundation's Connecting for Good Approach for Social Benefit

Provide an essay of up to 625 words describing the nominated organization's innovative achievements since July 1 2018. Describe the organization's innovative achievements in at least three (3) of the following areas: organizational management, corporate social responsibility, financial management, corporate communications, customer service, human resources and employee development, information technology, marketing, product design & development, and research & development:

Vodafone Turkey Foundation creates value by using technology for good and serve the society by conducting projects delivering public benefit (not commercial). Since 2007, It has made 41 Million TL social investment by touching more than 4 Million people. It has 2 main focus areas, women and children, with 3 projects:

Coding Tomorrow: The aim is to equip the kids aged between 7-14 with digital skills via coding and AI trainings. The project, in partnership with Habitat Association, reached more than 45.000 kids in 60 cities throughout the first 3 years. A coding truck visited disadvantaged regions of Turkey to introduce coding to children in 2018. Opening an AI classroom with MIT partnership, collaboration with Turkish Ministry of Education and reaching +100.000 children in all cities of Turkey are in the projects’ 2020 agenda.

Women First in Entrepreneurship: In partnership with the Turkish Ministry of Education and Turkish Informatics Foundation, the project aims to improve entrepreneurship skills of women wishing to generate income from handmade products through digital technologies since 2015. There is an online sales platform, oncekadin.gov.tr, to provide women sell their products. Entrepreneurship competition is organized to provide seed funding to women and create role models. The project has a mobile app, developed in 2018, providing in-class trainings online and easy access to product upload. Thanks to mobile app, product upload and sales revenue increased in a significant rate, 200%. Overall, the project reached 54.000 women in 81 cities.

Easy Rescue: Violence is the biggest problem women faced in Turkey. Easy Rescue mobile application was developed to help women in violence situations. Turkish Ministry of Family and Istanbul Bar Association are partners of the application. All features of the application were developed with related stakeholders (NGO, public, private sector) having close connection with women by understanding the needs. Women can reach their predetermined contacts or law enforcement agencies to call or send an emergency message including their current location with one touch. The app has some unique features:

-When a man opens the app, face recognition function works and the app appears as a flashlight application.
-Women can hide the app by transforming it to a flashlight app.
-Walk me home feature enables women’s saved contacts to track their route and if women left the route, a notification will be sent to these contacts.
-Women can send urgent SMS including their location by saying a specific self-determined keyword in Siri. (IOS only)
-Women can put any functions of the app to the phone’s mainpage as widget. (Android only)
-With Shake&Warn feature, urgent sms is sent only shaking the phone by predetermining the shake volume.

The application has reached 321.000 download till Dec’19.

Vodafone Volunteers is a community including 540 employees. They can volunteer in the Foundation projects with the incentive to take 2 days volunteer leave from the company.

To inform society about the projects, the Foundation works closely with Digital Marketing and PR departments of Vodafone. On average,15 Million impact score was reached in every project by PR activities since July 2018.

The Foundation is very active in social media, using Instagram, Twitter and Facebook accounts. It conducted 2 social media campaigns:

#BuMamaBenden (ThisFoodIsOnMe): Children participants of Coding Tomorrow designed an automated feeding bowl activated by tweet to help stray animals in need. People can command this machine by tweeting with the hashtag on Twitter. Reaching 144.392 tweets. It was the one of the most tweeted campaign in Turkey.

#BirFikrimVar (#IhaveAnIdea): The Foundation started a voting campaign in Twitter. Coding Tomorrow children came up with digital ideas to help the elderly, and people voted on the best idea. The campaign has received 9,000+ votes, where #BeniBul (#FindMe) idea was winner (65% vote).