Employee engagement sits at the heart of the strongest charity-corporate partnerships.
At their best, these projects add value on both sides. For charities, they unlock support in areas that build long-term capacity — the kind of skilled input that would otherwise be out of reach. For employees, they offer a chance to use their expertise in ways that genuinely help others, adding meaning to day-to-day work.
At Raise Your Hands, we work with our partners to push beyond the traditional volunteering day. We design experiences with real-world impact, shaped around the specific goals of both the company and the charity.
This is one of those projects.
The brief
As part of our partnership with Marshall Wace, we identified an opportunity to run a hackathon — a structured, skills-based challenge built around a real operational problem at one of our portfolio charities, Dandelion Time.
We started by sitting down with senior decision-makers at Marshall Wace to understand their goals: what they wanted their team to gain, how they wanted to show up for their social impact work, and what a successful outcome would look like.
On the charity side, Dandelion Time brought a genuine brief — not a manufactured exercise, but a real challenge they needed help solving.
The charity brief:
- Design a tech solution to streamline admin processes for families going through their nature-based therapy programmes
- Create an immersive, engaging online environment for service users — building a sense of belonging and keeping families connected to Dandelion Time between sessions
The company brief:
- Create an opportunity to demonstrate skills, collaborate as a team, and contribute something tangible from day one
- Give new starters at Marshall Wace a meaningful introduction to the firm’s social impact work
The outcome
Marshall Wace interns worked together to map out the user experience of an app — covering the front-end design and how it would integrate with Dandelion Time’s existing systems.
The result was presented directly to the charity, and refined following their feedback.
The participants were praised for closely following the brief, bringing genuine technical expertise, and handling the sensitive nature of the charity’s service users with care and thoughtfulness.
A one-day project. A real brief. A solution that Dandelion Time can actually use.
About Raise Your Hands Partners We’re a UK-based social impact consultancy working exclusively with finance firms, asset managers, and PE houses to build bespoke corporate giving and volunteering programmes. Since 2015, we’ve directed over £4M to a vetted portfolio of 16 high-impact small charities supporting children and young people across the UK.
If you’d like to explore what this could look like for your team, we’d love to hear from you.
