Mobilizing collective impact with b.world's latest release

Cross-team project sharing, and aggregate result visualization set a new standard for collaboration and learning in b.world’s latest release!

b.world's new aggregate results!

What if you could easily collaborate with teams outside your organization or from another program area within your organization, and aggregate and visualize the results of your shared project with the click of a button? Would you be able to spend more time making a difference instead of merging excel, google, or Airtable spreadsheets?

This b.world release mobilizes collective impact by offering two major new capabilities. First, you can share projects with external b.world teams to collaborate throughout the project lifecycle. Second, you can aggregate and visualize results from your own indicators, and indicators from projects shared with your b.world team, to optimize learning.

Together, these new capabilities streamline your processes, save you time, and open new doors to collaboration throughout the life-cycle of your mission critical projects. Read on for more details!

Project Sharing Across Teams:

One of the most eagerly anticipated enhancements by our current b.world users, this new and exciting feature enables b.world teams to selectively share projects with external collaborators. This feature will enable you to collaborate with individuals outside of your organization or program areas within your organization, streamlining and adding efficiencies to the way you work with each other. Collaborating with other non-profit organizations, social impact innovators, an external evaluator, or a university partner is as easy as clicking a button. (Deactivating shared project access is just as easy as well!) Share one project with multiple external parties, multiple projects with multiple parties, or any combination therein, while remaining confident that only the projects that you have shared with specific external users—and no additional projects or organizational data in your b.world team—will be visible to designated users.

‘Share’ function added to the header bar in each project enables sharing projects with users external to your b.world team.

What’s to come: Get even more nitty gritty with your project sharing with the ability to share specific components of specific projects with designated users.

Results Aggregation:

We know that fundraising is the engine that keeps your organization going, and donor reporting is what fuels that engine. Donors want you to answer those big questions about higher level impact like, “How many children did you help?” or “How many meals in total did you serve?” But that data often exists across different indicators and, in some cases, different projects, making it a painstaking task to aggregate that data. Our goal is to take the hurt out of crunching the numbers by creating the accompanying visuals that feed your reports. In b.world’s new Results section, all you have to do is select the indicators you want to combine to illustrate the impact you want to communicate, and we take care of the rest—calculations, data visualization…you name it. Even better, any indicators that have been added to the Project Elements section (i.e., indicators that can be reused across projects) and are used in two or more instances will be automatically aggregated without you having to do a single thing. Your Results dashboard will enable you to see all aggregate indicators you created and those automatically generated from your Project Elements indicators, share the indicators you created with the rest of your team, and see indicators that your fellow team members have shared. Seeing and learning from the results of your programs has never been easier!

Dashboard of aggregate results. ‘Team Results’ (top) includes auto-generated aggregates from Project Elements indicators and results you have created and shared; ‘My Results’ (bottom) are those you have created, but not shared with fellow team members.

Indicator selection screen for creating a result which includes the ability to select indicators (left), and the ability to further define the result (right)

Moreover, the Details page for each Result shows the component indicator data so that you can see where the aggregate results came from without having to navigate away from the Results section. The Dashboard and Details pages both provide the option to view different statistics for each aggregate result, depending on what’s important to you, your program managers, executives, board members and, of course, your donors.

Details page for one aggregate result. High-level information about the aggregate and its components are displayed at the top, and details about each component indicator are shown below.

What’s to come: Easily aggregate disaggregate data from across indicators and insert visuals from aggregate results into b.world stories.

Bug Fixes and Minor UI Improvements

Projects-Logframe: A number of minor improvements have been made to the Logframe section:

1. Dimensions can be added to an indicator even after data has been logged for that indicator.

2. Visual improvements were made to the way axes render on graphs.

3. For percentage indicators, Baseline and Target values display as percentages if the selected entry format is ‘percentage’ and as decimals if the selected entry format is ‘decimal.‘

4. Aggregable indicators with stakeholders now only sum the topline values for each reporting period so that data is not accidentally double counted.

5. Labels are now required in order to save data entered for flexible indicators.

Projects-Documents: The ‘Indicator Documents’ header will not appear unless there has been at least one document added to one indicator. Additionally, users can now add documents to an indicator and navigate to the indicator’s page from the Documents tab once at least one document has been attached via the indicator’s dedicated page.

Projects-Budget: A variety of minor user experience enhancements were made to the budget charts and the way transaction details and roll-up values are displayed.

Projects-Insights: Delete icons now appear for all insights.

As always, please continue to share your feedback and let us know what you love or if anything is not functioning as expected in the platform. If you're new to b.world, check out a video overview of the platform and then sign up for a free 30-day trial here! Thank you for your ongoing involvement and insight as we strive to design and build the best b.world we can for you and your social impact colleagues around the world.