Learn how Grassroot Soccer used Socialwok to increase productivity, win more grants, and further expand internationally to more effectively fight aids.
Customer
Grassroot Soccer is a non-profit organization with the mission of using the power of soccer to fight against HIV and AIDS. Grassroot Soccer aims to provide youth worldwide with the knowledge, life-skills and support to live HIV-free. Grassroot Soccer has also established itself as a premier provider of technical assistance to other "Sport for Development" organizations across the world.
Vendor
Socialwok is a project management and team collaboration service for businesses on Google Apps to share ideas, files and Google Docs within their organizations in their own secure and private workspaces.
Challenges
Thanks to the Salesforce foundation, Grassroot Soccer has developed an online Salesforce-based system to keep track of the scale and effectiveness of our HIV-education and prevention programmes. Grassroot Soccer works with local partner organizations on the ground to deploy this tracking system. The deployment process involves a lot of configuration and coding to customize the tracking system to the partner organization's local needs.
While working with a partner organization from Lesotho, Grassroot Soccer’s Curriculum & Training Development Coordinator Taylor Downs encountered the problem of partner requests being constantly overlooked and lost amongst many emails. Grassroot Soccer’s entire organization is using Google Apps for email and document management. Hence, they wanted a project management and team collaboration solution that could address the collaboration problem.
Solution
Since adopting Socialwok, team members working on the same project in partner organizations can post all updates related to the system specifications or requests to the project feed. Taylor Down simply needs to "check the wok" everytime when he needs to build more pieces of the partner organization’s system. In 3-4 minutes, he is completely up-to-speed with all the partner organization’s system requests without having to worry about overlooking anything.
Socialwok has enabled Grassroot Soccer to effectively collaborate with all the partner organizations involved. With Socialwok, Taylor Down can keep track of several projects and the associated Google Docs and Google Calendar events simultaneously by getting all the status updates at once in a Socialwok feed, instead of sorting through hundreds of emails.
Results
The productivity gains Socialwok helped Grassroot Soccer develop, allows them to more aggressively expand their program outreach in Africa. After using Socialwok to effectively and collaboratively design an M&E system for a partner organization in Lesotho, Grassroot Soccer has now landed grants to build similar systems for 3 other developmental organizations that are hoping to solve the HIV & AIDS problem in Southern Africa. By coupling the power of Google Apps with more effective and timely communications, Socialwok is now, in some way, preventing new HIV infections!
“Socialwok has reduced the turnaround time it takes to onboard a partner organization to our Grassroot soccer based HIV/AIDs prevention program. Helping us win 3 more grants and save more lives!,” says Taylor Down, Curriculum & Training Development Coordinator of Grassroot Soccer
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