success story
Bringing digital transformation to the UNDP
Connecting experts with SparkBlue
SparkBlue was launched as part of the United Nations Development Programme’s (UNDP) ambitious digital transformation goals:
Create a platform for seamless connection, dialogue, and ideation across all UNDP platforms to better serve their mission and allow internal and external communication between thousands of community members.
UNDP’s Challenges
Creating a Multi-stakeholder Platform
Transition
Moving on from Global Dev Hub
Global Dev Hub was the UNDP’s existing Open Social platform, focused exclusively on managing external stakeholders. There was a growing need for this platform to become a central hub of information and engagement for both internal and external participants and stakeholders.
A need for community features
There was a need to integrate more community features to facilitate stakeholder communication and collaboration.
Creating a seamless transition
The transition from the previous platform to the new platform needed to take place seamlessly.
Connect Experts
Creating Communities of Practice
On top of new community engagement features the UNDP needed a dashboard system around which to connect experts in their Communities of Practices.
Connecting knowledge
There is a need to connect expert knowledge within the organization and across their networks of partners.
Establish a Central hub
The platform should serve as a centralized hub for community engagement and communication around areas of expertise and practice.
Integrate
Internal & external tools
UNDP makes use of a set of internal and external tools to spark collaboration and engagement across the organization. All of these need to be integrated within a central community to streamline communication and co-working between stakeholders.
Easy sign-on
Allow for UNDP staff to sign onto external open source platforms using their UNDP (Microsoft) credentials.
Office 365 integration
Allow for relevant Yammer discussions, Delve profiles and data, and additional Office 365 content to be posted on our open source external platforms via API
Open Social’s Solution
SparkBlue Membership Management Platform
By building SparkBlue on top of their existing Open Social platform, we could enhance SparkBlue with a number of Open Social community engagement and collaboration extensions.
Crowd Innovation extension
Crowd Innovation provides a space for collaborative problem solving. Site managers can host a challenge to which members can collaboratively workshop solutions to.
Courses extension
Courses provide a guided learning experience and track members’ progress as they complete each section of the course.
Resource Library extension
Resource Library is a dynamic and easily searchable knowledge repository that feature a curated and tagged collection of resources.
Open Social’s Dashboard extension allowed the UNDP to create a fully integrated and centralized experience for members.
Communities of Practice
Each Communities of Practice has its own dashboard allowing a range of community activities and data relevant to that group to be placed in a single page.
Content Streams
Content blocks in the dashboards can be displayed as content streams, updating with the latest discussions, most interacted challenges, most like topics and more.
Notifications
Members can follow each Communities of Practice and get dashboard notifications when new items within that Communities of Practice tag is added.
SparkBlue makes use of Open Social’s Microsoft Office 365 integration for internal collaboration across the UNDP.
Single Sign-On
The use of profile credentials for Single Sign-on between Microsoft Office 365 and the SparkBlue platform.
Two-way interaction
Members are able to do two-way interactions with Yammer discussions on SparkBlue.
Content synchronization
SparkBlue content synchronizes with Yammer messages, likes, comments and files.
Sharing Success
SparkBlue Milestones
UNDP’s initial Open Social Platform called Global Dev Hub launches.
Global Dev Hub relaunches as SparkBlue in May 2020 as +39000 members are migrated from other existing sites used at the UN.
SparkBlue becomes the official internal platform for the UNDP, becoming a site that head of governments use to communicate and find information.
Sparkblue wins in the category of Government & NGO as well as Website of the year at the DrupalJam 2020 Splash Awards.
started
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