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Presentation of the “Founder Family” aka « FF »
We are a worldwide network of experts which has been taking practical actions on Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Employability since 2011 for the development of Africa. We are distributed around the world and composed of a Core team, Country managers, City managers, Local “Founder Family » clubs and local members. We have been inspiring and instilling skills, methods, transcontinental knowledge projects, tools and technics to enable the creation of a localised dynamic of territorial development.
Examples of support provided :
- Promote regional and international cooperation
- Targeted fields: entrepreneurship, Innovation and employability.
- Capitalise on digital solidarity
- Support cultural and economic exchanges amongst stakeholders
- Web design
- Coaching
- Event organisa4on: design kit, organiser memo, etc.
- Mentoring
- Media Coverage and Social network
- Providing Speakers and Mentors
- Sponsoring and public aid research
Why did we decide to use Workplace and how long have we been using it for?
We started using another enterprise social network (ESN): Slack. But the curve to learn this tool versus Workplace which is pretty similar to Facebook and the familiarity that members already had with Facebook decided us to switch to Workplace 4 months ago.
What do you use Workplace for?
we use it :
- to organise the work of our core team
- to organise small to large events across Africa and now to Europe as we are expanding.
- to manage the content for our digital media outlets (content, planning, authors, technical, etc…) 24h00.info, Startup.live and ESport Africa
- to manage partnership, sponsorship and event organisation requests
As part of the « Connecting > Broadcasting > Collaborating > Integrating » By the nature of our geographically dispersed organisation, the first two phases happened very quickly. We are still heavily in the 3rd phase ‘Collaborating’ to ensure coworkers use more extensively the tool as we are moving away from the regular Facebook onto Workplace. Coworkers are still used to rely on the FB groups.
What has worked well?
Dedicated groups, Workchat and Event planner have greatly helped to organise work such as validating concepts, for example, sharing knowledge and storing content in a single place such as articles, presentations and design work.
What would like to be improved?
Adding tools like a built in Trello or at least a direct interconnection with the Trello platform so notifications (For eg. card’s creation, modification & comments) will be pushed directly into Workplace and linked to the relevant subject. And also other built-in tools like mind-mapping, etc. Or zappier which enables one to get interconnection out of the box. Being able to have a distribution list that can be called as a tag to be able to attract attention to specific sets of people (For e.g. @my_distribution_list).
How do you ensure important content is seen?
We achieve that by creating dedicated groups per topic or even per event and inviting only the relevant contributors to it. With one « Global » group that every coworker can see. We also often tag the person that is the lead on the project or task.
Do employees distinguish between Workplace and regular Facebook? Are user habits different because it’s work?
It’s actually the opposite. Users use Workplace efficiently because it is similar to them to Facebook that they already know well. We actually used Facebook private groups before moving to Slack then onto Workplace.
Have you tried the new Org Charts feature? How has it been for you?
We are implementing the use now. In the end, we have a hybrid usage but that is pretty similar to large retail companies which have different locations scattered around the globe. So we can identify teams by location, department and the like.
What are the next steps?
We are currently working :
- on upcoming partner events « Startup weekend Perpignan« , « BeGame FIFA Ultimate Team 18 League for PS4 (online) », « Salon du Coworking », « 11e Forum économique de l’Océan Indien » etc…
- on our next big event « Cool Tech Festival » -The tech consumer show in Africa- planned for the end of Nov. Which will help us push the limits of Workplace in our case.
- As part of ‘Africa.NGO’ official launch announced at CTF, we will organise in the « Africa.NGO village » a Workplace demo and training workshops to our 20+ innovation spaces partners and their teams based around Africa and worldwide.
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