Mark and I were joined by some Directors and Senior Consultants from the South African firm this morning, who helped run sessions with interested NGO’s in the PwC Drop In Centre. This gave NGO’s the opportunity to discuss some key business issues in a 30 minute consulting appointment – we were fully booked!
Throughout the morning we saw around 30 NGO’s and to help make the short appointment time as valuable for them as possible, discussions were framed around our ‘proposition’ to the Beyond Sport projects which was developed in order to help the NGO’s better understand how PwC can help them. The proposition highlights six common areas for assistance, drawing on our experience delivering consulting to the 2010 Beyond Sport projects:
- Positioning & Strategy for Growth
- Measuring Social Impact
- Delivering Sustainable Programmes
- Achieving Financial Control
- Maximising your People
- Risk & Governance
We also developed a ‘PwC effect’ wall to showcase some of the work we completed with the Beyond Sport projects last year, as well as sharing some of the results of the interim impact assessment of our involvement with Beyond Sport. Initial feedback has very positive, with the NGO’s really grateful for some business insight and practical advice, and the PwC Consultants finding the sessions refreshing and a good opportunity to practice their communication skills.
After a packed morning it was off to the CTICC (a large conference venue in the centre of Cape Town) where we were joined by an additional 500 or so Corporates, Foundations and NGO’s for the second half of the summit. Whereas the first half of the week had been focused around knowledge sharing, up skilling and fostering NGO partnerships; the second half was really about shouting about the Sport for Development movement to the world and celebrating the incredible achievements of the Beyond Sport membership, especially the short listed projects (and the winners of course!).
That afternoon we were joined by some big names in the sport and development agenda space – Lord Paddy Ashdown (Chairman, UNICEF), Danny Jordaan (Former CEO, Fifa World Cup 2010 Organising Committee) and Olympic and Paralympic Gold medallists Michael Jordan and Oscar Pistorious... to name but a few! This impressive list of high profile individuals and sport celebrities shared their own journeys ‘beyond sport’ and participated in some interesting panel discussions including “In 2011 the world changed, what is sport’s place now?” which looked at the effect of the global financial crisis on NGO’s (in particular funding) and “Sport, Music and Film – The intersection of three catalysts for change” which explores what happens when these three catalyst ‘hooks’ are combined and the exponential effect on beneficiary groups – especially youngsters.
The afternoon closed with the first half of the Beyond Sport awards! See Beyond Sport’s website here for a full list of the winners and short list.
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