Innovative Solutions
Over the last 10 years we’ve spent a lot of time finding ways to help nonprofit organizations use technology effectively. Our team is dedicated to developing innovative solutions for our clients, but much of our discovery (or “research and development”) work has been done on our own time. As we formalized our new strategic plan in 2010, we knew the sector needed us to step-up our game and explore solutions that would have sector-wide impact.
We’re aware of the processes that many of the great technology innovators are using to be more deliberate about creating innovation. For example, Google allows employees one day a week to “explore”, Atlassian sponsors quarterly “FedEx Days” where people are expected to deliver a solution to a software problem overnight and, of course, we were wowed by Daniel Pink’s innovation overview summarized in this video.
In the first year of our five-year strategic plan in 2010, we grounded ourselves by looking at the ways some local Northwest companies spark innovation. We got to see PACCAR’s innovation lab in action and spend time with a couple of smart thinkers at Avanade. After observing these models, we took all our findings to our leadership team and CIO Council to develop our own “discovery process”.
With our process mapped out, we’ve spent the early part of 2011 in discussions with nonprofit executive directors and IT leaders to determine the most pressing needs of the nonprofit sector. We interviewed leaders from a cross section of the nonprofit sector and the findings indicated strong needs in the areas of databases, websites, hardware, software, web conferencing, and phone systems.
With this information, we turned loose our CIO Council and staff to brainstorm some key projects that would address the needs we’d uncovered. Of course, our list of projects was long, but we prioritized a few to start with.
In March, 2011 we hosted our first ever Discovery Blitz. We turned away from our email and smart phones and spent two days together innovating new solutions for some of the pressing problems our nonprofit clients face. Our first efforts delighted us. During our blitz, our team explored creating:
- A framework for moving organizations to the Cloud
- New Salesforce applications to increase fundraising capacity for our clients
- Developing the next version of our popular stable and secure assessment
- Mapping applications to display geographic data
- Business continuity plans in case of a physical disaster
We’ll definitely do more, so stay tuned!
