Why a Community as a Service platform, why not a nonprofit?

The research showed us that spinning up another nonprofit and facing the same challenges all nonprofits face was not going to aid in solving the real problem: Organizations and communities need a way to communicate, collaborate together, to secure economic infrastructure, and create stability during crisis situations and beyond. ‍

We recognized (during and after) the height of the pandemic, and many rounds of research for this platform, that we must align the organizers on one platform in order to create a safety net for the next catastrophe. Nonprofits, small to enterprise companies, philanthropic corporations, and government agencies across the country and the world need a way to communicate in times of crisis, sustain business during recovery, and beyond.

What the research showed us:

• There was no safety net for businesses or nonprofits during the early stages of the pandemic. This caused the closure of thousands of small businesses and nonprofits, at a time when aid was needed most and our economy was collapsing.

• Small businesses are socially minded and in a crisis were ready and willing to support aid efforts, but did not have the support or dedicated tools necessary to make it a sustainable effort.

• Nonprofits rallied, volunteers came together from all walks of life, all over the world, to support relief efforts during the Covid19 pandemic, but aid efforts stagnated for nonprofits focused solely on Covid19, many have suffered closures now that Covid19 is "under control".

• What we know for certain is that people, the public get tired of a cause and they move on, even though aid workers and volunteers are still pushing forward.

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How did the Impact Partners Network start?

Hi there, I'm Shawna Ruff, the Founder of the Impact Partners Network. This is the story of our founding...

In February of 2020 I had just graduated from Flatiron School, a UX/UI tech cohort. I was excited to get started back with Raven and Fox, my solo-preneur consulting company. I worked with nonprofits and women owned small businesses, focusing on operations efficiency. However, the pandemic struck and not only was the world upside down, but within a month of the first news of the virus spreading, all of my clients closed shop. I officially had to close my business in March of 2020.

As a UX designer I knew I could help, so I went online and found a group called Combat Covid. Digging into the site there were numerous projects sprouting up to support aid in the crisis. I jumped into the Masks for Docs thread almost immediately, joined the M4D slack channel, and got to work.

I started in the Seattle channel, made some connections and started coordinating aid in my Wallingford neighborhood. From late March to mid-April 2020 I was working out of a metal print shop in Fremont, Seattle. The owner, Don G. had given his entire shop over to the effort of making face shields for hospitals in the area. I coordinated the effort with a minimal team of 3 at the shop for a couple of weeks. By the end of the second week we had donated more than 700 face shields and provided a small, but significant impact at Overlake Hospital, UW Medical Center, and others.

At that point, I started to dive deeper with M4D and jumped in with their design team, as a UX researcher and designer. I started running regional and then national team coordination efforts via zoom, doing check ins with each team in the field, learning daily about their challenges and their success. I created action plans with stakeholders and provided research for the development team building the logistics platform. What started with a couple hundred people on the west coast, had grown to be more than 5000+ people across the globe working together, committed to communities in the pandemic crisis.

In May of 2020 I decided to branch out, leaving the M4D foundation. I became the founder of the Impact Partners Network to solve what I believed to be the core problem:

‍Organizations and communities need a way to communicate, collaborate together, to secure economic infrastructure, and create stability during crisis situations and beyond.