The Client

Edmund Hillary Fellowship’s (EHF) mission is to incubate solutions to global problems from Aotearoa New Zealand and make a lasting positive impact on the world. Part of their initial approach was to collaborate with Immigration NZ to create the Global Impact Visa. This visa is the world’s first immigration policy focused on creating a positive global impact, and arguably the most entrepreneur-friendly visa in the world. It brings world-class entrepreneurs, investors, and startup teams, to encourage more innovation and investment capital towards developing new transformative solutions for global challenges, from Aotearoa New Zealand. 

Through this project Optimi was embedded as a long-term technology partner, providing support for all of their digital operations.

The Challenge

• Hundreds of Fellow profiles are hardcoded on the website. The designer has to manually change them if they want to update anything.

• Hard to scale the existing system.

• Digital operations require a single source of truth that they didn’t have (data in lots of places but which one is the right one…?)

• Data was collected in Google forms and automatically stored in Airtable but the process was clunky, prone to error, and required entering data that should already be known.

Requirements

• Integrate with existing website (Squarespace) and automation tools (Zapier).

• Allow Fellows to edit their own profiles and have that information displayed and searchable in real-time on the website.

• Allow the public to find relevant Fellows by search criteria.

• Allow Fellows to see more information about each in a private directory.

• Allow staff to log in, see all data for everyone, and review updates.

• Integrate with existing organization data like staff records, back-end data operations, metrics, and reporting.

• Make the process seamless for Fellows.

• Build-in scalability, design the database so that functions can be added or extended later without having to start from scratch.

• Make sure the data is secure.

Solution

• Create a Knack database.

• Integrate Knack with Squarespace so that the directory is fully searchable and public and looks and feels like it’s part of Squarespace.

• Create a two-way form in Knack so that when Fellows log in, they see their data in the form and can change it in real-time without having to fill in everything from scratch.

• Migrate existing data from Airtable to Knack.

• Minimise use of other automation tools (eg. Zapier) to reduce complexity. Fellow data is entered straight into the right place minimizing the need for complex search automation.

Client Painpoints

• Manual admin processes are not scalable for a growing organization which creates a lot of growing pains.

• Hard to grow the systems while still managing 500 Fellows via manual Google forms and Google docs.

• Difficult to find Fellows information online and to keep it up to date.

• Too much time spent on manual admin, including data entry and repeated follow-ups of forms.

• It's frustrating for busy Fellows to enter in the same info multiple times.

• No way for the network to “self-serve” to update their own profiles online.

• Hard to find other Fellows with similar interests.

• The community platform “Hivebrite” didn’t provide easy-to-use directory profiles and wasn’t getting buy-in.

Opportunities Found

• Created a single source of truth where users only saw the data relevant to them.

• Automated a lot of manual admin work, ensuring consistency and dynamic updates of the website.

• Created a scalable system that can grow with the Fellowship.

• Setup everything to be managed by the EHF team so the requirements from Fellows are minimal and the Team can manage almost everything themselves.

• Reduction in automation needs increases the simplicity of the system and reduces reliance on Optimi needing to fix bugs regularly.

Workflow automation

Book keeping and reporting

Instant messaging

Web app database

Low code database

Website