Team4Tech recently engaged 26 employees from ThoughtFocus in a Design for Impact Workshop in collaboration with our US-based nonprofit partner, BUILD. Together, they explored AI and chatbot solutions to help BUILD manage its data and streamline reporting.
I loved the collaborative and empathetic environment this workshop created. Our employees were genuinely passionate about the work BUILD does, which inspired them to dive deeper into understanding the problem statement and exploring meaningful solutions. They were not only engaged in the process but also personally invested in making a difference.”
—ThoughtFocus Volunteer
Empowering Students to Become the CEOs of Their Own Lives
BUILD’s mission is to empower students to become the CEOs of their own lives through career success, entrepreneurial mindsets, and access to opportunity. Through entrepreneurship-based, experiential learning, BUILD partners with schools and corporate volunteers to help students in under-resourced communities build the skills, networks, and confidence to thrive in college, careers, and beyond. BUILD continues to support more than 2,000 alumni nationwide who have completed its programming, helping them pursue post-secondary education and succeed in future careers.
BUILD began partnering with Team4Tech in 2020 with a goal of implementing digital platform solutions that support curriculum and entrepreneurial learning. This is our fifth project engagement together.
Exploring AI for Improved Data Infrastructure and Reporting
Like many other nonprofits, BUILD is exploring how to incorporate artificial intelligence (AI) thoughtfully across the organization. While some staff report using AI tools informally, BUILD does not yet have an intentional, documented strategy for how AI will support its mission and operations. BUILD leadership expressed the need for integrating AI tools across organizational tasks to improve data tracking and efficiency.
BUILD collects meaningful data on its programming and alumni outcomes, but collection is largely manual and reactive. Patterns across enrollment, degree completion, and employment are often difficult to spot or require hours of analysis. BUILD sees AI and a chatbot solution as a promising way to support data collection, trend analysis, and automated reporting, among other possible uses.
A Two-Day Design Process
The workshop spanned eight hours over two days. Team4Tech facilitators guided ThoughtFocus volunteers through the design thinking process to ideate and prototype potential solutions to BUILD’s design challenge: “How might BUILD create a secure, staff-facing data assistant that helps post-secondary staff turn existing alumni and student data into timely, accurate, and actionable insights?”
On the first day, volunteers worked in small groups to generate preliminary ideas. Two major themes emerged from the initial pitches:
- Data Infrastructure: Volunteers recommended solutions and next steps that focused on cleaning, organizing, and restructuring BUILD’s highest-leverage data.
- Chatbot Solution: Volunteers proposed developing an AI solution that ingests the reports and key data spreadsheets BUILD uses regularly in order to automate reports for funders, generate important insights, and support seamless data tracking and reporting for staff.
Between the two days, BUILD compiled a substantial set of anonymized reports and data to help volunteers build prototypes. This gave volunteers the context to develop more detailed recommendations and to demonstrate how the chatbot and data infrastructure solutions could work together to support BUILD’s operational processes.
On the second day, volunteers regrouped into two subteams, each focused on one of the prioritized solutions. The subteams collaborated to move beyond ideas and deliver detailed, well-defined recommendations and prototypes.
It is important for companies and universities to offer programs like Team4Tech[‘s] because they provide employees with opportunities to apply their skills beyond their day-to-day responsibilities and contribute to meaningful social impact. Such programs foster collaboration, leadership, cultural awareness, and problem-solving while helping communities gain access to valuable educational and technological resources. They also strengthen employee engagement by creating a sense of purpose and connection to the organization’s values. Ultimately, Team4Tech benefits both participants and communities by promoting learning, innovation, and positive change on a global scale.”
— ThoughtFocus Volunteer
Skilled Volunteer Solutions Support Nonprofit Impact
The deliverables from this workshop will help strengthen BUILD’s data reporting systems and improve its efficiency, ultimately saving staff time. ThoughtFocus volunteers equipped the BUILD team with technical expertise, best practices, and clear next steps for the further design of these solutions. ThoughtFocus is committed to supporting the long-term implementation of the prototypes that came out of the workshop.
What I’m most excited about is leaving this process with tangible solutions that I can actually use: the Airtable/AI concepts for gathering, organizing, analyzing, and making sense of our data, as well as the chatbot and what it could enable for accessing and pulling insights from that information more easily. Those ideas really helped me see what a future system could look like where we’re not just collecting a lot of data, but can actually use it, understand it, and share what we’re learning in a much easier way.”
— Cindy Pineda, National Director, Post-Secondary Success, BUILD
We’re grateful to the ThoughtFocus volunteers who dedicated their time and expertise throughout the workshop, and to the BUILD team for their collaboration, insight, and iterative feedback throughout the project. We look forward to seeing how these solutions continue to evolve and help BUILD better support their learners and alumni through stronger data systems.
Team4Tech is proud to facilitate connections between volunteers and education-focused nonprofits like BUILD, improving education that ultimately prepares learners for better jobs and long-term employment. Our Design for Impact programming is just one example of how Team4Tech leverages skills-based volunteering to accelerate nonprofit impact globally.