Gene Miller (Brandeis Professor): Hello, it’s Gene Miller here, professor at the Brandeis Business School. And it is our pleasure to report the activities of the Perlmutter Fellows this summer. This project began just after the pandemic hit. In our leadership work at the Business School for not-for-profits, we realized how many of the not-for-profits were caught short in technical capabilities and abilities to communicate with their constituents with their doors being shuttered. Let’s hear from them, and see what they’ve created.
Emily Urbina (Client Services Director): Things progressed pretty rapidly around here. I mean it seemed to go from hearing about this virus in other places in the world and on the news, and it wasn’t really impacted out day-to-day life, to overnight our drop-in center was shut down, we had to change locations, staff hours were reduced and many people, both clients and staff, were no longer able to interact with us at all for health concerns and it drastically changed the circumstances under which we functioned. Just overnight.
Text in Video: In May, Professor Gene Miller saw the need to help nonprofits curb the losses they incurred as a result of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
Text in Video: Through the Perlmutter Fellowship, Professor Miller recruited Adam Fleishaker, Mitchell Dodell and Daniel Khudyak to create a solution.
Adam Fleishaker (Perlmutter Fellow): The Perlmutter Fellowship, we ended up developing software to enable nonprofits to interface with their constituents, particularly in disenfranchised communities.
Daniel Khudyak (Perlmutter Fellow): So what’s being created here is an elegant, simple to use, four function app. It provides the ability to inform constituents about virtually every aspect of a nonprofit’s program delivery. It serves as an event hub to monitor attendees and response rates. It’s a platform to seek help and set up sessions with case managers. And it provides a scoring capability to keep track of client progress and specific pressure points for each individual person.
Gini Mazman (Executive Director): Accessing social services for anyone is just very difficult. Trying to figure out who’s out there, who’s doing what, what the intake criteria is and things like that. And it’s exhausting for people, especially people that experiencing crisis or are in trouble.
Mitchell Dodell (Perlmutter Fellow): Haven’s largest concern was communication. How can they communicate with their clients in this new day and age where technology is really the only method, right?
Adam Fleishaker: And so, in seeing this, we thought, “well, how do we facilitate that electronically?” Especially with COVID-19, access to resources becomes more limited. Depending upon your income, your community, you may have disproportionate access to important resources that would enable you to do what you normally do.
Mitchell Dodell: This application can really be used for any organization that wants to have an all-in-one tool based around events. And the fact that it’s totally customizable really makes it great for organizations because they can customize it to their own business needs.
Emily Urbina: It’s difficult to capture all of what we do as an organization, so the app is a really awesome way for a young person to actually begin to engage with without making any commitment or going out of their comfort zone in any way, and gives us an open door to communicate with them and offer our services and kind of give us a chance to do a little bit of salesmanship and say, “Hey, we’d love to help, here’s the things that we can do”.
Daniel Khudyak: This app is not meant to replace a CRM platform but rather it’s for the tech challenged, cash challenge not-for-profits who want a way to stay easily connected with their clients. It is important especially now to not merely stay afloat, but for nonprofits to jump ahead of the curve and to lead the way in how they serve their communities.
Adam Fleishaker: One of the really interesting parts for me was being able to expand the language support. To see that I can get a call and register for the app and see it completely, natively in that user’s language, knowing that we’re breaking down those barriers even further—that was really heartening. I’m personally really passionate about civic tech, and tech that makes a difference. I know that Gene has some incredible opportunities in her work in Business 297C. I saw the impact that they were doing for nonprofits and it really inspired me. And also the component of how do we help nonprofits in this pandemic environment, how do I even further help in a time of need.
Mitchell Dodell: This idea of tech for good always really appealed to me. Being able to do something good and use the tools that I learned at school to accomplish that has been really awesome. My favorite part of doing this project was seeing The Haven Project’s reaction when we showed them something new that they saw that they had this idea, seeing someone else that has this dream that they think is so far away from them but I’m able to bring that to life has really been my favorite part. Just seeing their smiles when we call them. They’re like “That’s so cool! I could never do that!”, has been really awesome.
Adam Fleishaker: I’m just so, so incredibly part of the entire team, and so thankful to Gene and the Perlmutters for this opportunity to work on providing this service for up to so many different nonprofits. Being able to look at just the breadth of the work we accomplished, I’m just so thankful for that and that’s something that doesn’t come by every day, and I’m just so glad that I was a part of it.
Mitchell Dodell: One thing that I really love about Brandeis is our commitment to social justice and also the fact that we have a lot of really ambitious students. The small we’ve done this in, in the short time frame and we built something real that our clients are happy about, it’s just been amazing.
Emily Urbina: It is clear to me that the use of tools like this app that you guys created make us more efficient, make us more up-to-date and make us more accessible and in the longer that’s absolutely the work that we have to be doing. We have to put in the work, to continue to evolve, to meet the needs of the people around us. And so this is an excellent opportunity to do just that.
Adam Fleishaker: Just as the same way you pass the torch, I’d love to see what the next generation of Perlmutter Fellowship maintainees would do. How they can expand outreach to other people. How they can further the opportunities that we take for granted.
Text in Video: Thank you to the Perlmutters for the incredible opportunity to impact the nonprofit industry during a time when everyone needs a hand. Thank you to Gene Miller for giving us the platform to grow as individuals and to help those in need. Thank you to Ian Roy and Beth Marshdoyle for the advice and guidance along the way. Thank you to The Haven Project for trusting us with their program’s future and for everything they do for the community despite the obstacles in their way. Stay tuned for a word from Ian Roy about the broader opportunities for this app.
Ian Roy (Head of Brandeis MakerLab): Hi, my name is Ian Roy, I am the Director for Research, Technology and Innovation at Brandies. I am also the Founding Head of the MakerLab. The Perlmutter App that Daniel, Adam and Mitchell put together is unbelievable. I’ve been very inspired about the future of where this app could go. It’s one of the few all-the-way-ready apps that we’ve seen this year. Every year at Brandeis, there’s only a couple teams that really go all the way to a full, solving a real problem, having a full implementation that’s shovel ready and can be deployed. And this is one of those amazing, tremendous potential, could really make some difference in the nonprofit world. So I think they have a huge market opportunity. They’re in a really unique, competitive space where anything that would do what do is so prohibitively expensive that they sector that they’re working with wouldn’t use it. So I think if they can find a business model that’s a low-cost to get the companies involved and have a really good pitch to articulate how a company could envision working with them, they can do tremendous things for nonprofits getting in contact with their communities. What they’ve done for The Haven Project is the tip of the iceberg and where it’s headed in the future is really exciting. What they could potentially do with many more nonprofits who have similar problems of communication, outreach and about really community building.
Gene Miller: Wow! This work is fabulous. And it is bigger, deeper, broader than I originally anticipated. And the ramifications and the interest level of other not-for-profits are twirling around. We’ve decided to do a management consulting project in my class in the fall on the business ramifications and how to deal with this model. Thank you to everyone! Thank you for the funding, thank you to the fellows for a fabulous job well done, and thank you to the advisors. This is wonderful.