Digital Promise

Digital Promise is a global nonprofit working to expand opportunity for every learner through innovation challenges.

The challenge

Digital Promise is a global nonprofit working to expand opportunity for every learner. Working with educators, researchers, technology leaders, and communities, Digital Promise designs, investigates, and scales innovations that support learners, especially those who’ve been historically and systematically excluded.

With a strong focus on digital inclusion and raising awareness around sustainability issues, in 2021, Digital Promise and Ciena devised a global design challenge that would invite students to design solutions that could address the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) within their communities.

To facilitate this critical challenge Digital Promise understood they would need to utilize a specialized platform that could:

  • Host the challenge on a custom website to promote the challenge
  • Manage applications submitted by students and educators
  • Ensure a simple and straightforward judging process
  • Showcase the chosen projects
PHASE 1
PHASE 2
PHASE 3

The solution

Digital Promise sought out platforms that could be utilized to host their global design challenge. After careful consideration of various solution providers, the organization concluded that Skipso’s powerful Innovation Management platform could meet their specific requirements.

Set-up of the platform was handled by Skipso’s team of innovation customer success managers that worked to configure a platform workflow for the challenge that:

  • Would allow large volumes of applicants to make submissions through easy-to-use forms that also allowed for attachments of different documents and media
  • Facilitated a streamlined judging process that allowed for evaluation of applications through scorecards by judges from several organizations
  • Enabled the team to showcase the winning projects and submissions to the wider public after being selected

In parallel, Skipso' design studio worked on a custom designed interface and information pages for the platform to meet the organization’s brand guidelines and enhance the user journey.

The results

From set-up to application management, to judging, Digital Promise was provided with a platform that is straightforward, and intuitive and enabled the program to run smoothly.

Digital Promise and Ciena received over 100 projects from over 200 educators from communities from around the globe, including in countries such as Canada, Botswana, India, Brazil, Uganda, USA, Nigeria, Mozambique, Tanzania and Colombia. Projects focused on innovative solutions addressing food security, climate action, quality education and much more.

Students and educators from around the world were able to access the challenge through the dedicated platform and Digital Promise was pleased with the ease at which applicants could make their applications.  

Based on the success of the program, Digital Promise and Ciena will be launching the challenge as a yearly program utilizing Skipso’s platform.