From LIFT Participant to LIFT Thesis

At the beginning of this year, I began my journey with LIFT as a participant in the public roundtables. Over the endless lockdowns, the roundtables acted as a safe space for me, a place where I could honestly and openly discuss how I was feeling in relation to the week’s theme. The roundtables also provided me with an aim for the week ahead as I focused on carrying out my action step for the week.

In May of this year, I was delighted to be so warmly welcomed to the LIFT team and very grateful for the opportunity to work with such an exciting organisation as part of my MSc Thesis in Digital Marketing Strategy at Trinity College Dublin. Following some discussions with the team and Eva, the marketing manager, we decided to focus my efforts on increasing LIFT’s number of partner organisations. As LIFT is a non-profit organisation, partner organisations are vital to generating revenue through LIFT’s ‘Robin Hood’ funding model. Under this funding model, partner organisations make an annual contribution to LIFT according to the organisation’s turnover. This model allows LIFT to offer the roundtable process free to organisations unable to contribute, as well as to schools, universities, and the general public. As a result, increasing LIFT’s number of partner organisations also fuels its network or ‘ripple’ effect. In the long-term, this helps to bring LIFT closer to its aim of reaching 10% of the Irish population. With this knowledge, I began researching and developing a digital marketing strategy to target prospective partner organisations.

During my time with LIFT, I also undertook LIFT’s facilitator training. Undertaking this training cemented LIFT’s benefits for workplace organisations to me. Through the training process, I felt that I developed a great relationship with the others in my training group – despite them being strangers at the beginning of the day. Ultimately, the facilitator training allowed me to fully understand how the LIFT process can enhance and even transform workplace culture.

My project itself focused on clearly defining LIFT’s value proposition for partner organisations. Accordingly, I undertook primary research to identify what prospects sought to achieve in their workplace environment. The results from the surveys and interviews were unsurprising. Most prospects valued the opportunity to help their employees develop a strong sense of personal agency (i.e., a leader-based culture), improve interpersonal relations and enhance employee engagement: all which LIFT offers partner organisations. These aspects formed the basis of the exploratory paid Twitter campaigns I created later in the month.

Throughout my time working with LIFT, I felt fully supported by the team and was very grateful to have the opportunity to apply my newly acquired digital marketing skills to a real-life scenario. Overall, it was wonderful to be part of such an exciting movement of Irish society – even if just for a few months – and to witness the rapid growth of the movement in my short time on the LIFT team was the icing on the cake.

Thank you to all at LIFT for giving me this brilliant learning experience!