UNICEF — Zheng Joo

Addressing the offer gap in UNICEF’s corporate partnership strategy to unlock greater donation autonomy for SMEs

CLIENTUNICEF, Sweden

YEAR
2025

SERVICE
Research, Strategy, Agile Prototype, Innovation

While UNICEF has a strong track record with large corporate partners, it offers limited collaboration options for SMEs. The problem is worsened by institutional barriers that prohibit SMEs from using the UNICEF logo. They are now seeking to develop future concepts that will narrow this offer gap and increase contributions.

SOLUTION

We developed SmartGiv, a digital platform that aligns SME contributions with their values and capabilities. It uniquely allows businesses to donate a flexible mix of funds, time, or skills. The platform's coverage and tracking features ensure full transparency by capturing a detailed record of employee time, financial allocation, and overall impact.

ROLE

My contribution in this project was to lead the strategic and synthesis aspects, including scaling the discovery phase in agile timing, moderating expert interviews, and collaborating on the synthesis to produce shared findings. These provided the foundation for ideation and our rapid prototyping, in which I supported the wireframing and UX/UI design.

Built with Ceyda Karanfil, Jaydatta Nikalje, and Óli Hall. Completed in one week.

Approach

Scaling Discovery in Agile

How can we fit discovery into Agile? Since we inherited research insights from another working team and client within an agile process, we use Assumption Mapping to identify and prioritise the most specific areas of enquiry. This helps efficiently narrow the knowledge gap regarding why SMEs do not donate.

We captured the highest priority assumptions to conduct expert interviews and desk research against UNICEF’s list of SME organisational leadership, employees, and UNICEF’s employees.

Assumption Mapping, Experts' Interview , SMEs companies case analysis

Key Insights: Each business’s motivation type determines how it wants to participate in giving

Post-interview synthesis revealed that the challenge isn’t SME reluctance, but UNICEF’s limited ability to differentiate why and how SMEs want to engage. This led us to our guiding question:

How Might We connect social purpose with business value to demonstrate that doing good benefits the business?
From this, we developed a typology-aware strategic framework to map SME motivation types and craft partnership offers aligned to their values, ambitions, and operational realities.

Outcome

Contribute Your Way

We prototyped SmartGiv, a future concept that introduces a smart donation digital platform enabling SMEs to contribute according to their unique values, capacities, and goals—whether through funds, time, or skills.

It reframes ‘giving’ as a form of strategic collaboration rather than one-directional philanthropy, thereby aligning their financial objectives with social responsibility.

The platform's coverage and tracking features ensure full transparency by capturing a detailed record of employee time, financial allocation, and overall impact.

Reflection

Although the prototype has not yet been tested directly with SMEs due to the short timeline and agile sprint constraints, early feedback from the client team was highly positive.

They expressed particular curiosity about the “Contribute Time” component—an idea that challenges traditional donation models by emphasising human capital and expertise as forms of impact. This curiosity reflects both a validation of novelty and an appetite to explore new definitions of contribution within the SME context.

The next step will be to test the prototype with SMEs, validating desirability and refining platform features to ensure the model effectively bridges the tension between social purpose and commercial motivation—the very tension that inspired this project from the start.