Midas Kenkyuu serves as an integral partner to the Virginia Department of Transportation (VDOT) Business Opportunity and Workforce Development (BOWD) Center in providing supportive services to Disadvantaged Business Enterprises (DBEs). DBEs certification is a federal program overseen by the US Department of Transportation that provides small businesses owned and controlled by socially and economically disadvantaged individuals a fair opportunity to compete for federally funded transportation contracts.
Prior to the COVID-19 Pandemic, the BOWD Center provided training and workshops to DBEs at its facility in Sandston, Virginia. These events were sparsely attended because they required travel to a central part of the state. While COVID-19 initially stalled the training opportunities, Midas Kenkyuu was able to assist VDOT with pivoting the workshops to a successful series of online webinars. The sessions are well-regarded and highly attended, allowing VDOT to meet its mission.
We provide white glove support to VDOT and assists with the entire life cycle of producing online meetings. These services include agenda creation, goal-setting for events, promotion and marketing, managing registration, training presenters on how to use the webinar platform, script-writing, conducting rehearsals, hosting the webinar, displaying audio-visual components, facilitating questions and answers from the audience, conducting feedback surveys, and developing metrics and reports for VDOT to report on its successes through the program.
This partnership between Midas Kenkyuu LLC and VDOT has produced dozens of training opportunities for thousands of attendees. On feedback surveys, attendees were asked to rate whether the webinar was easy to access from a technology perspective, and Midas Kenkyuu LLC scored an average of 4.6 out of 5, or a 92% satisfaction rate.
Because of our assistance, the VDOT BOWD Center was able to meet its mission and successfully collaborate with and provide training and assistance to the small business community. Midas Kenkyuu LLC regularly coordinated with a variety of stakeholders, including executives from VDOT and the US Department of Transportation, officers of large engineering and construction firms, government employees, policy experts, and small and minority-owned businesses.
