TD taps into employee expertise to help equip non-profit organizations with data and analytics capabilities and custom-built solutions

TORONTO, Oct. 31, 2019 /CNW/ - TD Bank Group (TD) today announced the launch of a new initiative as part of its commitment to helping people develop skills for the future economy.

The initiative, called TD Mindpower: Analytics for Social Good, helps non-profit organizations leverage data and analytics to grow their community impact. The initiative pairs non-profit organizations with a dedicated team of TD data and analytics employees who volunteer their time and skills to help the organization draw new insights from their data. The teams from TD work on a wide range of projects with the organizations, including building data and analytics-powered dashboards, forecasting key trends and developing new methods for measuring, communicating and growing their community impact through data. 

"Data and analytics will be key to our economy, and the ability to turn data into insights is critical for both organizations and individuals to thrive in the future," says Peter Husar, Vice President, Analytics Strategy and Planning, Enterprise Data and Analytics, TD. "We've made great progress in how we use data to serve our customers better, and we're committed to using our expertise to support our communities as well. Through TD Mindpower, non-profit organizations can access advanced data analytics capabilities to help grow their community impact in a sustainable way, and our colleagues gain meaningful professional experience through skills-based volunteering."

TD Mindpower completed its pilot phase in the spring of 2019, which saw TD employees volunteer over 1,500 hours working with six organizations. Since the official launch of the initiative in September 2019, the number of non-profit participants has doubled to 12 across four locations: Toronto, ON and Montreal, QC in Canada, and Portland, ME and Philadelphia, PA in the United States.

"One of our big challenges is ensuring we're maximizing the benefit we provide to our communities with the funds we have", says Mack Rogers, Executive Director, ABC Life Literacy Canada, a non-profit organization dedicated to increasing literacy skills that participated in both the TD Mindpower pilot and official program launch. "The TD Mindpower team helped us improve our data management practices, setting us up to generate deeper insights and improve the delivery of our programs. These new insights are helping us arm people with the knowledge to make good financial decisions and more effectively measure our impact."

Other non-profit organizations that are participating in this year's program include:

Ongoing investments in skill development for the future

TD Mindpower aligns with The Ready Commitment, where TD aspires to link its business, philanthropy and human capital to help people have opportunities to succeed in a changing world. The TD Mindpower initiative is just one example of how the Bank is leveraging skills-based volunteering to support communities and drive progress.

TD Mindpower also builds on TD's ongoing commitment to supporting data and analytics skill development across sectors:

• TD expanded its collaboration with University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management in 2018 with $4 million to fund exploration of real-world data and analytics applications and open the TD Management Data & Analytics Lab.
• Western University's Faculty of Science established the TD Analytics Hub, a professorship in Data Analytics and four annual Women in Data Analytics Bursaries made possible by a $1 million contribution by TD in 2017.
• TD is a founding and continued supporter of the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence, which represents a world-class collaboration between academic institutions, incubators, accelerators, start-ups, and established companies that will advance data-powered artificial intelligence research and help drive the adoption of data analytics and artificial intelligence technologies across Canada.

About TD Bank Group

The Toronto-Dominion Bank and its subsidiaries are collectively known as TD Bank Group ("TD" or the "Bank"). TD is the fifth largest bank in North America by branches and serves over 26 million customers in three key businesses operating in a number of locations in financial centres around the globe: Canadian Retail, including TD Canada Trust, TD Auto Finance Canada, TD Wealth (Canada), TD Direct Investing, and TD Insurance; U.S. Retail, including TD Bank, America's Most Convenient Bank^®, TD Auto Finance U.S., TD Wealth (U.S.), and an investment in TD Ameritrade; and Wholesale Banking, including TD Securities. TD also ranks among the world's leading online financial services firms, with more than 13 million active online and mobile customers. TD had CDN$1.4 trillion in assets on July 31, 2019. The Toronto-Dominion Bank trades under the symbol "TD" on the Toronto and New York Stock Exchanges.  

SOURCE TD Bank Group