UNICEF and Les Mills use Loomio to coordinate global fundraising campaign

People in 75 countries joined a fundraising fitness class for supporting children’s access to water in East Africa. The event was a result of Unicef NZ and Les Mills putting their strengths together in a global campaign supported by Loomio.

In mid 2017 MovetheWorld.live established a partnership between UNICEF NZ and global fitness company Les Mills International, sharing a goal of creating a world where every child survives and thrives.

Access to clean drinking water, one of our fundamental needs, affects over 2.1 billion people worldwide. Children are especially vulnerable to the effects of waterborne diseases.

On the 18th of November 2017 tens of thousands of people in 75 countries took part in the “Workout for Water” campaign led by Les Mills instructors and clubs. The goal was to raise funds and awareness for UNICEF’s global programmes for children.

Building a global team; delivering with speed

One of the challenges faced from the project outset was to mobilise team members across multiple locations and timezones.

“Creating a team space to facilitate, capture and consolidate our thinking; make decisions and collaborate on the work was a priority from the beginning”, says Chris Rae, Programme Manager, Move the World.live.

The newly established team crossed four organisations based in Wellington, Auckland, Geneva, Copenhagen and London. Face to face meetings were rarely an option and at no point was the whole team in the same room.

“We had about 3 months to move from zero to global fundraising capability. While we used tools like Trello to manage our Product Backlog and Zoom for our face-to-face virtual meetings, we wanted an intentionally designed virtual team space to help the team form quickly, where anybody could start or participate in conversations”.

Understandably the team was initially reticent about using “another new tool” but before long everyone was using Loomio including the Project Governance Board.

Anna Harre, UNICEF NZ’s Digital Specialist was new to Loomio. “I thought Loomio was the ideal tool to use to organise our group conversations and keep them out of email. The way topics were categorised worked really well for the team, the threads were easy to keep track of and it was very simple to begin a new thread when another major decision needed to be made. I liked the notifications you received daily saying ‘things you missed on Loomio'. I used the ‘Unread Threads' tab all the time, and the ‘Recent Threads' tab was also really handy to catch up on conversations I might have missed.”

Multifunctional Loomio keeps everything secure and confidential

The new Loomio product features released earlier this year helped the Move the World team to save time.

“Coordinating team calendars in multiple timezones became an easy task with Loomio Time Poll. Using threads for each meeting meant that all related content, including decisions and actions could be stored in one place; where everyone could continue to contribute even after the meeting was completed,” describes Mary O’ Keeffe, Project Manager, MoveTheWorld.live

“I love the ‘check’ function” says Mary, “It’s an easy way for people to say ‘yes, I’ve completed/I agree’ and takes no time at all. We actually used dot voting to agree our MoveTheWorld.live brand. It meant a lot to involve the team in that decision.”

The team made extensive use of sub-groups with vendors, technical and management teams. Importantly, Loomio allowed specific content to be shared efficiently with only the relevant people. Moreover, the security of Loomio gave the team trust to use it as a confidential platform for reviewing and archiving documents.

Global group-work resulted in funds for water

Workout for Water was run in less than six months, which is a relatively short time for a global campaign by two large organisations. Regardless of geographical challenges and time-pressure, the team managed to organise their work successfully. As a result, the campaign has raised over USD $700k to date; enough to set up 1,700 water pumps.

You can support the Workout for Water campaign with a donation here. Try the Loomio tool at loomio.org ❤️