Announcing ImpactCloud for Crisis Responders

The frequency, severity and cost of natural disasters and other crisis is elevating as time progresses. More than ever, the humanitarian agencies responsible for helping people during crisis require: better human-to-human collaboration and sate-of-the-art information sharing infrastructure to maintain a complete operational picture.

The technology tools needed to respond to each crisis is typically outdated and has to be replicated manually for each crisis, this is costly, takes too much time, and directly impacts the ability of relief agencies to provide help when and where needed.

More nonprofit crisis response organizations are migrating to cloud technologies that improve collaboration and response times, but not without considerable effort and investment that they would be rather be focusing on people in need, not technology integration.

In partnership with NetHope, Team Rubicon and other nonprofits, Box.org is jointly launching ImpactCloud, a coalition of cloud vendors (DocuSign, Okta, Salesforce.org, Splunk, Tableau and Twilio) to support crisis response organizations. The coalition and its innovation framework enable nonprofits to research, affordably and quickly research, acquire, build, deploy, and fund more integrated cloud solutions built on Box Platform for crisis response.

Initially involving seven leading cloud vendors and two leading crisis response agencies, Team Rubicon and NetHope, who are are coming together to transform the way relief agencies deploy technology to respond to global crises-- improving collaboration, increasing speed of response, and driving down costs.

ImpactCloud brings together critical cloud-based technologies and relief agency expertise to expedite:

• Collaborative Needs Assessment: Improved collaboration between cloud vendors and relief agencies will ensure that needs are fully understood and jointly addressed.
• Shared Solution Development: The changing needs of relief agencies and volunteers will be met through collaborative solution development.
• Streamlined Acquisition & Deployment: Response time and costs will be reduced for each crisis by reducing the amount of custom IT deployment, and through specialized pricing and bundling options.
• Funding Promotion & Support: Agency fundraising efforts will be improved by highlighting innovation and spending efficiency.

ImpactCloud's coalition members initial focus on is on facilitating multi-vendor technology innovation for crisis response orgs that provide better visibility, collaboration, and mobile capacity in crisis response. ImpactCloud's innovation framework will offer a better model for replicating cloud tech innovations across the crisis response sector and across future responses per organization. Finally, ImpactCloud is focused on promoting the impact innovations generated generate making innovation a more attractive investment pathway for nonprofit funders.

Crisis response is the first focus area for ImpactCloud, however as the coalition membership grows and more nonprofit collaborators get involved in the initiative, multi-vendor cloud innovation in new nonprofit service areas and departmental innovation areas like funding development innovation will emerge.

Please visit ImpactCloud.org housed on NetHope's Solution Center to learn more or dig into how coalition members cloud technologies are being used by crisis response organizations already. There are multiple ways to contact members or sign up to stay in touch with this work on the site. Please join the conversation using the hashtag #ImpactCloud.

You can also meet up with ImpactCloud coalition members at the below list of events:

• BoxWorks: Sept 8th in the Box for Good Pavilion in San Francisco
• CGI's Annual Meeting: Sept 19-21 in NYC
• Splunk.conf: Sept 26-29 in Orlando
• Dreamforce for Nonprofits: Oct 4-7 in San Francisco
• Tableau Conference: Nov 7-11 in Austin
• NetHope Global Summit: Nov 7-11 in Atlanta