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Publication

Revitalizing MPower & boosting revenue

Baker, Bella
Hall, Zac
Hwang, Hwanee
Kirk, Austin
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Abstract

Our senior design team has the privilege of working with the nonprofit organization, MPower, this semester to help increase their revenue. MPower serves adults with developmental disabilities (who they refer to as clients) through residential services, an adult day center, and vocational services. MPower has asked us to focus most of our efforts on the vocational services which is where they provide employment for their clients. They receive funding from the Oklahoma Department of Human Services, Payne County United Way, and local thrift store Elite Repeat. In the past year and half, they have had to take about half a million dollars out of savings to combat inflation and wage increases. After visiting their site and speaking at length with the directors of MPower, we decided to focus our efforts where we think we can make the biggest difference. We decided to help them restructure their contract pricing and increase their brand visibility. MPower establishes contracts with government entities and private businesses for the work their clients do. The contracts include the scope of the work they will be doing and the price they will get paid to do it. After reviewing their financial information, they are pricing themselves much lower than the market rate. For a lot of their jobs, they are only getting paid enough to cover raw materials, so they have to use savings to pay their staff and clients. We performed an economic analysis to provide MPower with a pricing formula template (in the form of an Excel sheet) for them to use as a tool when determining how much to charge for their work. A few other issues we observed were lack of work, donors, and overall visibility. We think the root of these issues are due to low brand awareness. We sent out a survey to the OSU community to verify our hypothesis. Out of 122 responses, only 7.4% percent of responders had ever heard of MPower. It was the least known non-profit out of the six non-profits (all in Stillwater) that we asked about. We decided to form a marketing plan for MPower and provide them with a new website prototype to boost their outreach and connect them with large donors to provide funding and large companies to provide work. This included creating a Content Calendar (schedule for when to post content on social media) for them, creating a prototype for a new website, and hiring an intern to manage and further improve their social media outreach. We believe that these actions will help MPower both in the present and in the future by not only diversifying and increasing their revenue streams but also improving their visibility and connections with the local Stillwater community.

Date
2024-04-26