We are incredibly excited about HundrED Connect and the growth potential that will come as a result of this platform! If you haven’t already heard, HundrED Connect is our newest initiative that aims to bring together people and the resources they need to accomplish our mission to help improve education by encouraging pedagogically sound, ambitious innovations to spread across the world.
The platform connects our network of like-minded and engaged innovators, implementers, advisors, educators, and funders, with the goal to help more than 50% of our innovations to grow by at least 10% annually. On the platform, selected global and spotlight innovators will have exclusive and complementary access and create valuable connections to solve their unique challenges.
We’ve spent years highlighting quality education innovations, and now we want to accelerate change by building the most valuable global education network through HundrED Connect.
Prior to the launch, we conducted a survey so that innovators can tell us what they need in order to scale. We also held a Connect workshop during the HundrED Summit to better understand how we can serve the HundrED community.
The HundrED Connect platform was designed by identifying the most pronounced needs highlighted by the innovator community: namely, connections to other innovators and industry experts, PR and marketing, funding needs including equity investments, donations and review of donor proposals, R&D services, and other services such as consulting, recruitment and accounting.
Who is the platform for and how does the process work?
The HundrED Connect platform is an invitation only, closed group. Access to creating, seeing, and responding to requests is restricted to our selected innovators (piloting with the HundrED 2020 Collection), implementers, and funders. Everyone on the platform can create request “cards” on the Connect web application, which will be visible to the whole community. Other members of the community can respond to the request by connecting with the requestor directly. To ensure that all the requests are attended to, HundrED will also ensure each request is reviewed and help identify someone inside or outside the community who can help, and then work to facilitate that connection.
In the long term, HundrED also aims to build a capacity-building and knowledge-sharing component to the Connect platform, so that both funders and innovators can go to the platform to learn or access the tools they need to grow different areas of their organisations. Our dream is to build an easy to use service that can offer meaningful help for HundrED Community, and we look forward to sharing many success stories from the platform.
Next steps and what to expect
We already have over 100 request cards submitted on the HundrED Connect platform! We have started working to solve some of the requests on and off the platform, and have drafted a process to help ensure that we can efficiently facilitate quality, impactful connections that can lead to meaningful scale.
While we cannot guarantee the outcome of each connection, we strive to learn from the feedback we are receiving from our community to continuously improve the service, all the while expanding our own network with industry experts, growing the funders community, and creating resources to better serve different innovator needs. We foresee being able to meet some requests within a relatively short time, while others may take longer to resolve, depending on their level of complexity. We do however strive to solve at least 50% of the requests submitted on the platform within 6 months. This commitment will help us focus our efforts to ensure we have the right combination of short-term results and scalable processes.
If you have any questions, please contact Romayne Javangwe at connect@hundred.org
