Civic Tech
Program Manager
Problem #1: The National Conference on Citizenship had a large data set on civic health. While the organization routinely released reports, the data and reports remained largely inaccessible and unused by the communities represented in the data.
Solution: As an organization, we created the Civic Data Challenge, a national competition to engage coders, developers, designers, data scientists, and any other interested professionals in making our civic health data beautiful, useful, and accessible. We kept the parameters intentionally broad to see what we would get.
Problem #2: The first year of the Challenge we received several beautiful and engaging entries BUT they remained largely unused by their target communities and did not have much of a life beyond the competition. We needed to be more intentional in our actions.
Solution: As the Program Manager, I led the goal planning for the second iteration of the Challenge. I defined each of our goals, set our metrics for success, and outlined our action items.
I then re-structured the Challenge to better meet our goals. Whereas the first iteration was broad in scope, the second iteration focused on demonstrable utility - our top goal. The revamped Challenge included 3 phases (Ideation, Creation, and Implementation) and participants were asked to collaborate with local leaders in order to respond to specific communities or social issues. I was very intentional and aligned our actions, communications, and materials with our program goals.
Outcome: While there is always room for improvement, many of our program goals were met. I presented our lessons learned at several conferences, including A Better World by Design, and collaborated with the non-profit Kids Count to create a toolkit to be used by other nonprofits interested in engaging the tech sector. I believe that it's important to share our successes (and failures) so that other organizations for good can continue to build on our work.