Virtual Communities For Impact

Katka Vokrinkova

Global Technology Director

Impact Hub

CASE STUDY

Salesforce Community Cloud - Impact Hub

REGIONAL SCOPE

100 different locations in 60 countries

IMPACT AREA

Social entrepreneurship, business development

ANNUAL BUDGET

N/A

# OF MEMBERS

17,000

ABOUT

Founded in 2005 in London, Impact Hub partners with companies and organisations focused on social innovation. As a global platform for empowering social change, Impact Hub oversees a 100+ strong network of hubs in more than 60 countries, which foster entrepreneurship and business development. To foster their members’ ambitions most effectively, they provide a variety of supporting services, such as incubation and acceleration programs, knowledge resources, co-working space and now also a virtual platform for connecting their initiatives globally with the right talent, resources and tools to make maximum impact.

Interview

How has using Salesforce’ Community Cloud improved collaboration across the global Impact Hub community?

With 17,000 members worldwide, capturing knowledge and exchanging ideas on such a global scale can be challenging. Since 2017, the team has been using Community Cloud to facilitate vital connections between its many members. “Everyone wants to be able to connect to other people doing similar work around the world,” said Petr Skvaril, Global Partnership Director. “In reality, many start-ups are focused on solving a local problem and don’t look beyond their immediate region. With Salesforce, we can facilitate better connections at a global level.”

Community Cloud also allows members and Impact Hub partners to run simultaneous live events across a variety of global regions, for example 300 events were coordinated across 40 cities to launch a new initiative, without the need for time-consuming, manual processes. Meanwhile, partner organisations looking for innovative start-ups can search Impact Hub’s community to identify prospects and connect with members.

When members need to connect or collaborate with other organisations, Chatter and Global Search provide access to a vast network of skilled workers. Knowledge exchange and collaboration become borderless.

Although Community Cloud has been released to 15 locations and a pool of 2,000 users, Impact Hub’s rollout is only just beginning, and by the end of 2019 it hopes to have 37 locations onboarded with 5,000 active members.

As the organisation grows, Salesforce is helping it to achieve ambitions to quadruple growth in the coming years and to help it build connections to better address sustainability initiatives across the world. Gabriela Gandel, Global Executive Director, points to the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, which focus on global challenges related to poverty, inequality, climate, environmental degradation, prosperity, and peace and justice. “Salesforce helps us break out of silos more effectively than before by coming together on one platform to address serious world issues,” she said.

For example Evrnu, an organisation creating sustainable textiles, was just an idea before its founder went through Impact Hub Seattle’s Fledge Accelerator programme and made contacts at networking events. Meanwhile, a student who created drones as part of his thesis found them in high demand as part of the rescue mission in the aftermath of Typhoon Haylan in the Philippines, which killed 600 people. At Impact Hub Manila he launched SkyEye to leverage the technology to fight rural poverty, and has partnered with a UN-led NGO coalition project to undertake pre-crisis mapping to help people better prepare for natural disasters.

Source:
https://www.salesforce.org/stories/impact-hub-network/#