Digital Systems Revolution

The Opportunity : This was an amazing and challenging project at Sunrise. In the Spring of 2019 the organization had gone through a “trigger moment” and had scaled up its membership. Suddenly- thousands of young people were excited to take action on the climate.

Problem Scope: One of the major challenges was the lack of digital and operational infrastructure available in the nonprofit space to support a fast-paced, large scale mobilization of young people to take national and local action on climate.

Digital Solutions Criteria

One of my first thoughts here was that I should start looking elsewhere to think about how this mass-scale operation could be expanded. The scenarios included one to two week turnarounds for massive mobilizations including travel, funding, and registrations. Here are the criteria I worked off of before a larger stakeholder process to test different systems across departments.

Mobile

These solutions should allow for all parts of the execution to happen on a phone. Booking travel, submitting receipts, payment, and submitting information should be able to happen in real time.

Fast-Paced

Because of the nature of politics, climate policies, and the small windows of time we have to make change, these systems had to move through in 1-5 days max.

Decentralized Execution and Centralized Foundation

Because of the national programs and 300 ‘hubs’ or chapters across the country, the solutions needed to work across all states and be able to have visibility nationally on the back end.

Automated Storage

Because of compliance, regulations, and tracking needs, reporting needed to be able to be stored automatically and searchable.

Digital Solution Examples

These are just some of the digital solutions employed across my time at the organization. To read more, read my profile at Blackbaud here.

TripActions

Trip Actions Allowed for mobile booking, including volunteer and staff roles, and unique trip identifiers to allow for storage for visibility and permissions. It also used chat systems and groups to further assist guests or staff members with travel.