Case study | Learning organisation

Transform International is a non-governmental organisation (NGO) supporting a network of development institutions around the world. Their mission is to support locally-operated centres to lead sustainable development within the areas of WASH (water, sanitation and hygiene), energy efficiency and renewables and technologies for agricultural value chains.

Noddlepod is a crucial component in Transform International’s mission as it serves as the hub connecting each centre from across the globe, the platform for sharing best practice between locations, and as a vital tool for promoting collaboration and for supporting the transfer of knowledge-into-practice.

Transform International has built up an extended network of academics and practitioners, which the centres are able to access via this collaborative platform. The organisation encourages employees from each centre to share knowledge and resources across the network, and to discuss best practice and learnings through Noddlepod

“It’s about sharing knowledge between centres and across our network” says Nancy Gilbert, Executive Director at Transform International. Nancy has extensive field experience herself from working with how appropriate technologies can improve development in the Niger Delta.

Image credit: http://www.thars.org/photos.htm Transform International believe that community development and sustainable change requires ownership and capacity in the local community. These projects need to draw on global resources and lessons learned continuously, and to translate this into local best practice.

“For centres to become self-sustaining they need to have access to skills and knowledge as well as resources and support” explains Nancy. “Transform is about building local capacity for change and to achieve that mission “building the institutional memory is crucial.”

Before onboarding Noddlepod, Transform International had relied on email and Skype to communicate with their centres. Knowledge shared in virtual meetings, conference calls and even by email was proving to be difficult to reference and track between multiple locations and the many team workers across the network. As a result, valuable insights were only available to those in attendance, or for those “copied in”, and reliant on individual memory and discussions.

Finding a platform to enable more effective collaboration and sharing was a high priority for the organisation.

Non-governmental organisations like Transform International have made great progress globally in reducing poverty, increasing incomes and improving the health and wellbeing of people around the world. Yet, big challenges still remain and it is critical that development transformation continues and is done so effectively. Transform is committed to effective development and sustainable change, in which clear and efficient communication and sharing plays a crucial role.

Efficient and effective sharing and capturing the network’s collective knowledge and learnings, helps to tighten up efficiencies and avoid repeating the same mistakes.

As the people working on projects and centres can change, having a hub for communication and knowledge sharing means new team members can learn from past team member experiences.

Nancy Gilbert has no illusions, “Building a learning organisation is hard and takes time. But without an effective way of capturing the gems shared in collaboration and discussions, it is near impossible. That’s why it was critical for us to find something more effective and reliable for sharing all these nuggets of information.”

Transform needed some way to connect everybody which was going to be intuitive and easy for people to use. Facebook was considered, because of its popularity and user numbers however, Nancy explains: “The issue with Facebook is that it doesn’t allow you to track topics easily or to store documents. It just didn’t have the range of tools and support we needed. It simply wasn’t good enough for what we wanted to do.”

Transform International had a need for a system to enable knowledge sharing in a way which it could be found again. A system in which they could build their collective, organisational knowledge and memory.

This led them to look at more advanced platforms for collaboration and knowledge management, but found these tools to be financially unattainable.

“They were just outrageously expensive” says Nancy Gilbert. “We needed something to give us the structure, the ease of use and the flexibility, but also something that we could afford. Noddlepod was in that sweet spot. In fact, Noddlepod was the only one in that sweet spot.”

Transform International adopted Noddlepod as their knowledge sharing and communication platform in September 2017. “Noddlepod is critical to what we do”, says Nancy Gilbert.

So how do you build valuable communities, sharing knowledge and learning from one another? In Transform International’s case many members of the community have never even met in person, but are asked to share lessons learned - both from successes and failures.

“It’s a catch 22, like any other type of behaviour change”, explains Nancy. “People need to see the value to start using it, but they won’t see that value until they start using it”.
“It took a lot of nudging and reminding initially, but as soon as people started using Noddlepod, the value was clear.”

Through nudging, reinforcing and modeling the behaviour they want in the community, participation has built up, as has the trust between the members of the community. The centres have a lot of the same challenges. There is a lot to be gained from sharing experiences, grant applications and reflections on what should have been done differently to avoid those painful lessons.

“Noddlepod allows us to organise and structure the information, conversations and resources that build up over time as an organisation. We can save money and resources by working more efficiently. Sharing and modifying best practice as we learn as a group. Making sure lessons are learned and shared, and that no-one is reinventing the wheel”.

Noddlepod is immensely flexible in its simplicity. Categories and tags help to keep content organised. Users can filter content by type or follow content of interest. Important content can be “pinned” or marked as “official”. Content can even be archived as it becomes obsolete.

“How users experience the tool is important to us. Noddlepod just works! It allows us to focus on building up the community and the collective intelligence which is so core to our mission”, says Nancy.

Additionally, monitoring the community gives Transform International and its external advisors valuable insight into what is important to their members and how they can best support them.

“We learn with this community, not just about the topics that this community cares about, but also how we best share, discuss and learn as a group”.

Image credit and thanks to: Transform International, Thars, Jacana and Empower Tanzania.

Building a learning organisation

An NGO case study on knowledge sharing

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