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What is “Founder Family“ or “FF” (media editor)
We are a network of specialists who carry out concrete actions around Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and Employability for the development of Africa since 2011. We have members based all over the world and structured as follows … Core team, Country managers, City managers, local “Founder Family” clubs, and local actors.
We work by inspiring and instilling skills, methods, transcontinental knowledge projects, tools, and techniques to enable the creation of a localized territorial development dynamic.
Examples of assistance provided:
- Web Design
- Training
- Event organization: design kit, organizer’s guide, etc.
- Mentoring
- Media coverage and social networks
- Provision of speakers and mentors
- Sponsorship and public fund research.
Why did you decide to use Workplace and for how long?
We started using another Enterprise Social Network (ESN) application: Slack. Given the learning curve of this tool compared to Workplace – which is very close to Facebook – as well as the familiarity members already had with the latter, we decided to dive in and switch to Workplace 4 months ago.
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What do you use Workplace for?
We use it to:
- organize our core team’s work
- organize events of various sizes across Africa and now in Europe where we are expanding.
- Managing our digital media (content, planning, authors, technicians, etc.) 24h00.info, Startup.live and ESports Africa
- Manage our partnerships, as well as organization requests and media event coverage
- In the evolution diagram presented by Workplace “Connection > Transmission > Collaboration > Integration”, due to our presence in many countries, the first two phases were very fast. We are still at the beginning of the third phase of “Collaboration” where we are pushing our members to use Workplace almost exclusively instead of the Facebook used for many years.
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Who and what was useful?
Dedicated groups per project or multi-company, Workchat and meeting management have, of course, helped us organize our work—for example, to verify new concepts, share knowledge, and store content in a unique place available for articles, presentations, and our graphic designers’ work.
What improvements would you like to see happen soon?
Task management tools or at least an integration with the Trello platform to receive notifications (creation, modification, and comments) directly in Workplace in the right group. Other integrated tools like mindmapping, etc., would be welcome, or at least an integration with Zapier that allows interconnecting external applications in a few clicks. Having the ability to have a distribution list that can be added to a conversation via a tag to attract the attention of a specific group of people (for example, @my_distribution_list).
How do you make sure important information is seen?
We created dedicated groups for projects that even have topics for events and we only invite the necessary people. We have a general group called “Global” to reach all members at once. We often use tags (e.g., @name) to intercept the project manager or the task of an involved person.
Will members differentiate between Workplace and Facebook? Are regular members different because it’s work?
It is the opposite of what we are observing. Our members use Workplace with great efficiency because the tools are very close to Facebook and they know them very well. We used Facebook private groups extensively to organize ourselves before bravely switching to Workplace.
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Did you try the new org chart functionality?
We are urging all our members to update it. We have a hybrid use, but it is very similar to the use that large distribution companies I think have with different geographically dispersed points of sale. We can identify teams by location, department, etc.
What are the next steps?
We are currently working on:
- upcoming weekly events “Startup Weekend Perpignan”, “Begame Ligue FIFA Ultimate Team 18 for PS4 (online)”, “Salon du Coworking”, “11th Indian Ocean Economic Forum” etc.
- as well as our next big event “Cool Tech Festival” – The tech event for consumers in Africa – for late November 2017.
- We are testing the limits of Workplace in our case.
- In the context of the official launch of Africa.ngo announced at the CTF, we are organizing the “Africa.NGO city“ demonstration workshops for Workplace training for our 20+ partner innovation spaces and their groups based everywhere in Africa and the world.
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