Making a social impact isn’t enough. If you’re a for-profit company, you have to demonstrate to potential corporate clients that there is a return on their investment.
When Katlyn Grasso approached corporations about supporting a leadership training program for high school and college women, she was referred to their foundations or to their Community Relations departments. Her challenge was to show companies that the program was in their interest: They could make or save money. Spending money just to feel good wasn’t in corporate budgets.
It took several iterations and a lot of support, but Grasso has proved her point. Now she can help other women find the opportunities she enjoyed as an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business. There, she found support in terms of money, mentorship and introductions. The grant funding she got allowed Grasso the opportunity to test and refine a hypothesis, which led to her social enterprise.
In 2013, as a sophomore at Wharton, Grasso wondered why only 5.4% of Fortune 500 CEOs were women. With funding from a Wharton Social Impact Initiative Research grant, she undertook a research project among high school girls and corporate executives. The research revealed that executive women attributed their success to an early leadership experience, such as being captain of a team or leader of a club.
Recognizing that not every girl has these opportunities, Grasso wanted to create other leadership experiences for young women. In the summer of 2013, she created the Leadership Camp for Girls as a minimum viable product (MVP) in her hometown of Buffalo. It was a four-week program during which high school girls met with female corporate executives. The girls wanted a personal experience during which they could hone their skills.
Next, using a 2014 Wharton SIRE Grant, Grasso studied how the media young girls consume influence leadership development. That year, she launched GenHERation, which connected 250 young women in the Northeast to leadership opportunities. Every week, a company challenged the girls to solve a real-life problem, such as creating a marketing strategy to help a bank reach young women or creating product packaging for a toy company.
Companies were willing to pay for these research insights. Grasso also found that companies were willing to pay to recruit young talent to their companies. Her program created an inexpensive, more effective way to reach young, ambitious women. HR departments are now a primary target market. Corporations now pay a yearly fee for a suite of services customized to their needs.
“Early on, we suffered from a chicken-and-egg problem,” said Grasso. Corporations wanted to know that GenHERation already had young, ambitious women in their database and an effective program before committing. The women wanted to to be part of a program that had big, well known companies. The $175,000 from Wharton and Penn grants allowed GenHERation the time needed to build both. It wasn’t just money that Wharton and Penn provided. The alumni also provided critical introductions to companies that become clients. In turn, those highly satisfied clients have provided additional referrals to GenHERation.
GenHERation has also become expert in reaching Generation Z. Now, you might think that means a lot of social media but, because GenHERation focuses on ambitious young women, old-style grassroots techniques -- outreach through high school principals, church groups, sports teams and Girl Scout troops, stories about the program in local media -- work best. By year’s end, Grasso hopes to have a community of 100,000 women who aspire to do great things.
Interestingly, Gen Z is a particularly entrepreneurial generation. They want opportunities in young, innovative companies that are on the rise. GenHERation is now recruiting smaller companies to its program.
GenHERation just completed a seven-city tour for 500 smart, snappy young women and has a website filled with content. The women come from all socioeconomic backgrounds and aspire to be everything from nurses to engineers. The one thing they share is ambition.
The next challenge for Grasso is to close a $500,000 to $1 million round of financing from angels. So far, the one thing that funders have common is that they are Wharton and Penn alumni. But with the potential to affect so many lives and provide so much talent to businesses, I think alums of other institutions will sign on, too.
