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What is the “Founder Family” or “FF”? (editor of this Media, ed.)
We are a network of experts carrying 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 knowledge, tools, and techniques through skills, methods, and transcontinental projects to enable the creation of localized territorial development dynamics.
Examples of assistance provided:
- Web Design
- Coaching
- Event organization: design kit, organizer’s guide, etc.
- Mentoring
- Media and social media coverage
- Provision of speakers and mentors
- Sponsoring and public fundraising
Why did you decide to use Workplace and for how long?
We started using another Enterprise Social Network (ESN): Slack. The learning curve of this tool compared to Workplace – which is very close to Facebook – as well as the familiarity that members already had with the latter decided us to take the plunge and switch to Workplace 4 months ago.
Workplace for which uses?
We use it for:
- organizing the work of our core team
- organizing events of various sizes across Africa and now in Europe where we are expanding.
- Managing our digital media (content, planning, authors, technical, etc…) 24h00.info, Startup.live and ESports Africa
- Managing our partnerships as well as event organization and media coverage requests
- In the evolution pattern presented by Workplace “Connecting > Broadcasting > Collaborating > Integrating”, due to our presence in many countries, the first two phases were very fast. We are still at the beginning of the third ‘Collaborating’ phase where we encourage our members to use Workplace almost exclusively instead of Facebook, which was used for many years.
What was useful?
Groups dedicated by project or multi-company, Workchat obviously and meeting management have helped us a lot to organize our work, for example, to validate new concepts, share knowledge and store content in a single available location such as articles, presentations and the work of our graphic designers.
What improvements would you like to see coming soon?
Task management tools or at least an integration with the Trello platform to receive notifications (creation, modification & comments) directly in the right group in Workplace. Other integrated tools such as mindmapping, etc. would be welcome or at least an integration with Zapier which allows interconnecting external applications in a few clicks.
Have the possibility of having a distribution list that can be added to a conversation via a tag to attract the attention of a specific group of people (e.g. @my_distribution_list)
How do you ensure that important information is seen?
We create dedicated groups by project or subject or even by event and invite only the necessary people. We have a general group named “Global” to reach all members at once.
Often we use tags (e.g.: @name) to call upon a project manager, a task manager or a person to be involved.
Do your members distinguish between Workplace and Facebook? Are habits different because it is work?
It is actually the opposite that we observe. Our members use Workplace with great efficiency because the tool is very close to Facebook, which they know very well. We used Facebook private groups extensively to organize ourselves before briefly switching to Workplace.
Have you tried the new ‘Org Chart’ feature?
We are pushing all our members to update it. We have a hybrid use for it, but it is very similar to the use made by large distribution companies, I think, which have different points of sale geographically spread out. We can identify teams by location, department, etc…
What are the next steps?
We are working on:
- upcoming partner 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 – scheduled for late November 2017. It will allow us to push the limits of Workplace in our case.
- As part of the official launch of Africa.ngo announced during CTF, we will organize in the “Africa.NGO village” demo and training workshops on Workplace for our 20+ partner innovation spaces and their teams based across Africa and the world.
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