Altruisa Inc. is a nonprofit that leverages its media and technology platform, free of use for nonprofit partners, to accelerate social change. Impact-making organizations can sign up to become members and further connect to potential donors, volunteers, partnerships, and grant programs through our platform. This summer, my role as corporate social responsibility (CSR) intern with the strategic planning and research team involved much secondary research and delivering briefings to team members on CSR-related topics. Our goal in the CSR space was to identify ways our platform could bridge the gap between corporations, especially small- to medium-size businesses, with impact-making organizations to form partnerships for more significant impact.

Some of my deliverables involved an introduction to CSR, understanding the different types of programs under the CSR umbrella term, and exploring which departments are usually responsible for CSR oversight within corporations. Next, I narrowed my scope down to corporate partnerships and philanthropy to fully understand the landscape of how businesses usually form their partnerships and how our platform could better equip nonprofits with the right resources to facilitate collaboration. Overall, my role was to identify strategies and look at existing technology solutions on how Altruisa could better enhance corporate partnerships between for-profit and nonprofit organizations.

In my MPA degree, we often discuss the stakeholders involved during a policy setting or policy implementation phase. In addition, our stakeholder analysis also includes considerations of their buy-ins. For example, what could be the reason why local governments would or would not support a particular piece of legislation? During the summer internship, I applied the same analysis technique to identify different aspects of corporation, nonprofit, consumer, and investor views of corporate partnerships. During the training, I did an overall of four deliverables to share my findings with the team, thereby practicing my presentation and public speaking skills. Lastly, the internship also gave me an excellent opportunity to develop two user guides for nonprofits and one DEI policy statement for Altruisa. It was good practice for policy writing to learning more about inclusive and non-gendred terms in the DEI context.

Most of my previous work experiences were in government and nonprofit think tanks. Thus, I did not have a concrete understanding of how businesses ran their CSR programs other than relying primarily on secondary research. Though web-based research provides an overall picture of how companies carry out positive social and environmental benefits, the strategies I identified in the deliverables may be less realistic in real-world settings without having first-hand experiences with how CSR evolves among businesses these days.

Another challenge I faced was the strategic planning and execution of fundraising. As part of the strategic planning and research team, we often discussed fundraising in our meetings. Especially with an early-stage nonprofit startup, we had to map out short-term and long-term strategies throughout the year. I felt challenged because I did not have previous experience thinking about the momentum and design that goes into developing different programs, campaigns, and events to attract funds.

When I first stumbled across Altruisa, I was amazed by the founders’ quick action and determination in founding a nonprofit to support more nonprofits. As someone who cares deeply about social issues and empowerment, I found myself aligned with the founders on vision, particularly being age peers. It was inspiring to be surrounded by a team of doers willing to put in long hours of hard work to make the Altruisa platform come to life. My experience with Altruisa has been very positive. The team dynamic is welcoming and encourages everyone to share inputs. I am happy to stay with the team post-internship and continue to jump on calls for further discussions on defining objectives and key results (OKRs) and tackle some higher level questions after the soft launch of our website.