Delivering Impact Through Pro Bono Volunteerism

Capital One delivers impact by creating opportunities for its associates to leverage their wide-ranging skill sets through its Skills-Based Pro Bono program.

Launched in 2020, the Skills-Based Pro Bono program built upon volunteerism efforts from our Brand, Design, and Legal departments. This program now serves as an enterprise-wide effort that directly supports organizations such as nonprofits, startups, small businesses and Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFIs) to help build capacity to meet their mission and access resources needed to scale.

This expansion was born out of the recognition that the same skills that Capital One associates bring to further our mission to Change Banking for Good can also help our community partners make significant strides toward advancing economic mobility across the U.S.

“No other financial institution is approaching volunteerism as broadly and impactfully as Capital One,” says Lisa Quebedeaux, Grant Manager at Neighborhood Housing Services of Chicago, an organization supported by Brand and Cyber Pro Bono programs in 2023. “We recognize that there are institutions that are larger grant donors in the industry, but none are offering their skill share even remotely as well. The projects that Capital One annually allows applications on are legitimately the ones most pertinent to the needs of nonprofit organizations at the time.”

More than 1,100 Capital One associates engaged in Pro Bono Volunteerism in 2023, supporting 169 unique community partners. Associates from teams across Capital One have committed their time and expertise to help organizations serve more beneficiaries, become more efficient, and deliver on their missions more effectively. This in turn helps organizations navigate staffing limitations, funding constraints, and threats to organizational resilience, among other challenges.

“It was inspiring to work alongside such talented and motivated individuals who shared a common goal,” says Balasubramanian Kirahamdurai, a Senior Software Engineer at Capital One who supported a Tech Pro Bono engagement. “Through this project I learned how to effectively communicate and collaborate within a newly formed team, and sharpened my technical skills. This project allowed me to apply my knowledge to real-world challenges and make a tangible impact to the nonprofit organization. I feel proud of the solution we developed, and it has boosted my confidence in my abilities.”

Capital One associates supported 169 unique community partners in 2023 through Pro Bono Volunteerism. Of those partners, nearly nine in every 10 reported being able to:

• More effectively focus on their mission and vision.
• Improve their social capital.
• Increase their network of subject matter experts who can offer them specific knowledge, skills, and support.

“In the current market, skills and experience can be both scarce and costly for nonprofit organizations. Our Pro Bono program gives us a powerful avenue to deliver against these constraints by sharing our greatest resource with community partners and small businesses: our talent. Further, this model provides a mutually beneficial experience to our associates, offering innovative training and development opportunities, higher retention and overall job fulfillment.” - Kerone Vatel, Head of Community Impact & Investment

Pro Bono Spotlights:

GreenPath Financial Wellness (Detroit, Michigan)

Design and Product Pro Bono

Big Picture: Design and Product associates supported two efforts with GreenPath Financial Wellness (GreenPath), an organization that offers free credit counseling and debt counseling to help ease client’s financial stress, address their financial concerns, and develop plans for living a financially healthy life.

Our Approach: These two engagements sought to help GreenPath gain insight into the customer journey and build and strengthen its human centered design skills.

The Impact:  Over the course of the Design engagement, associates generated a service blueprint of the customer journey and GreenPath’s process for the first 60 days of the onboarding. Additionally, Design associates created and executed two human centered design workshops and supported the development of a prototype for a new solution. During the Product engagement, Capital One associates helped GreenPath develop compelling storytelling to highlight their results, expand outreach, and attract new partners.

What They’re Saying: “GreenPath and Capital One are both focused on improving the financial wellness of our mutual customers,” says Kristen Holt, President and Chief Executive Officer at GreenPath. “We appreciate our partnership and the opportunity to work together to address three of GreenPath’s business challenges in 2023. The insights and suggestions we received from these pro bono engagements were relevant and enlightening.”

Partnership for the Future (Richmond, Virginia)

Tech Pro Bono

Big picture: Tech associates supported Partnership for the Future (PFF), a community-driven college preparation and workforce development program dedicated to breaking the cycle of poverty for young people by providing training and educational opportunities.

Our Approach: This team recognized that PFF’s data was compiled and processed manually, which made it challenging to trace data back to original source files. It helped PFF to create and automate reports and dashboards to track primary buckets of funding, student data, and to measure success of students and outcomes.

The Impact: Over the course of this engagement, Tech associates cleaned up 20 years of student data, defined the critical student attributes to migrate to a cloud-based artificial intelligence tool, and configured the tool to meet PFF requirements.

What They’re Saying: “The recently completed Pro Bono Tech engagement with Capital One is a game-changer for PFF,” says Jimmy Lee, Chief Operating Officer at PFF. “The knowledge and professionalism of the entire team was impressive from start to finish. These early wins give me extremely high confidence that this pro bono initiative will deliver better student success outcomes, increased donor funding, and staff cost savings.”

Jamaica Plain Neighborhood Development Center (Boston, Massachusetts)

Tech Pro Bono

Big Picture: Tech associates worked with Jamaica Plain Neighborhood Development Center (JPNDC), an organization that develops affordable housing and seeks to transform the lives and amplify the voices of Boston residents who have been excluded from prosperity by economic inequities.

Our Approach: This engagement enabled JPNDC to streamline data operations to increase its organizational sustainability by diversifying funding streams and freeing up time devoted to manual data management. In turn, JPNDC could then devote its resources toward cultivating more innovation in its content and fundraising strategies.

The Impact: Over the course of this engagement, this team helped JPNDC automate certain day-to-day activities and streamline data entry. It helped JPNDC increase its capacity through transforming its approaches to certain procedures by creating pathways and infrastructure.

What They’re Saying: “We are a community organization devoted to helping people achieve economic security and mobility, and we depend on good relationships with the people who donate to make our work possible,” says Sally Swenson, Vice President of Fundraising and Communications at Jamaica Plain Neighborhood Development Center. “The Capital One Pro Bono team went above and beyond to help us build our capacity to track charitable donations to our organization.”

Framewrk (Charlotte, North Carolina)

Tech and Product Pro Bono

Big Picture: Tech and Product Pro Bono associates participated in two unique pro bono engagements to support Framewrk, an organization that supports small businesses via access to resources, infrastructure, and community. 

Our Approach: Tech Pro Bono associates created a technology roadmap, which helped Framewrk to understand the systems, processes, and people needed to reach its long-term goals for its vision of driving economic mobility with its clients.

Additionally, Capital One Product associates supported the development of a new technology for Framewrk to conduct user discovery, as well as a new process for its product managers to use to consistently improve its product offerings.

The Impact: Over the course of this engagement, Capital One Tech associates provided practical recommendations across key focus areas such as business and tech capabilities, technology architecture, software development, technology operations, and technology risk.

Capital One Product associates also provided resources for collecting and synthesizing customer feedback. 

What They’re Saying: “Capital One understood the nature of working with a startup and built process-based recommendations that could be applied despite voluminous data sets,” says David Hunt, Founder of Framewrk. “The Framewrk team extends our deepest gratitude to the entire Capital One team for the Pro Bono program, for their tireless work, stewardship of moving organizations forward and patience.”

Neighborhood Housing Services of Chicago (Chicago, Illinois)

Brand and Cyber Pro Bono

Big Picture: Through two unique engagements, Brand and Cyber associates worked with Neighborhood Housing Services of Chicago (NHS Chicago), an organization that works to stabilize and revitalize low and moderate-income communities throughout the greater Chicagoland area and suburbs.  

Our Approach: This engagement sought to bolster NHS Chicago’s partnership with the Neighborhood Lending Services branch to review and audit current marketing efforts, messaging, and collateral to provide a recommendation on whether or not a rebrand would be beneficial. These associates also offered guidance on strengthening existing branding efforts through customer journey mapping and brand strategy. Additionally, our Cyber associates conducted a comprehensive review of NHS Chicago’s existing cyber security program and identified areas of improvement and provided risk recommendations.

The Impact: Over the course of this engagement, Brand associates delivered naming strategy recommendations, customer journey maps for five different customer segments, a competitive analysis, a strategy overview, and branding recommendations. Further, Brand associates provided policy and procedure deliverables to enhance NHS Chicago’s ability to protect the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of NHS information. 

What They’re Saying: “We've always deeply appreciated the multi-dimensional ways that Capital One approaches philanthropy,” Quebedeaux said. “We appreciate the patience and understanding Capital One associates give in supporting individuals who are often at the beginning of their career. This work is not only helpful to our organization, but also for helping those employees grow in experience and responsibility." 

Working Credit (Chicago, Illinois)

Data Pro Bono

Big Picture: Data associates worked with Working Credit, a non-profit organization that aids people in building and sustaining a strong credit score.

Our Approach: This team supported Working Credit on its journey to implementing a cloud-based data warehouse and improved its predictive modeling framework. This warehouse provides Working Credit with details on what stage potential clients reached failing to sign up, and the predictive modeling framework provides a pipeline for various models, which includes predicting the next best action for clients to raise their credit score. In the future this could include measuring the performance for certain workshops or programs that Working Credit has. 

This team of Data associates also created a model that generated participant profiles based on credit score bands and various other credit and financial features that Working Credit collects. These early profiles could be refined to identify trends and match the right financial product or program to clients.

The Impact: Over the course of this engagement, Data associates created the data warehouse and modeling framework to optimize operations within Working Credit, ultimately allowing the organization to serve a larger part of its community.

What They’re Saying: “The work we have done with the Capital One Pro Bono data team has been immensely helpful for Working Credit,” says Kristin Schell, Chief Program Officer at Working Credit. “Capital One associates have worked efficiently to provide us with data solutions that visualized our data in a way that we wouldn't have thought of or had the capacity to do it alone. This has allowed our financial counselors to work more efficiently with our participants and allowed our Executive team and managers to glean insights to provide a more effective credit building program.”

Dallas Innovation Alliance (Dallas, Texas)

Data Pro Bono

Big Picture: Data associates worked with the Dallas Innovation Alliance (DIA), a public-private partnership dedicated to supporting the design and execution of the City of Dallas' smart cities strategy.  

Our Approach: Through this effort, DIA was able to better structure its internal data, standardize its data capturing methods, and create dashboards to visualize their impact. 

The Impact: Over the course of this engagement, Data associates assisted with data integration and offered guidance around how to utilize a newly adopted platform.

What They’re Saying: “Not only am I thoroughly grateful for the team's technical expertise and solutions provided, but for their general want and desire to provide tools, programs, feedback, and knowledge so that steps can be taken even beyond the time dedicated with them to continue scaling internally,” says Karmenly Alegria, Business Process Specialist at Dallas Innovation Alliance. “I am forever grateful that Capital One does pro-bono work to this degree. Being able to have such a dedicated group of people provide such an open and direct level of assistance was career changing and highly appreciated.