Founded by Bill Drayton and inspired by the legacies of Mahatma Gandhi and the Civil Rights Movement, Ashoka has been working with nearly 4,000 social entrepreneurs, each with the potential to spark systemic change. From revolutionizing education to combating climate change, Ashoka’s network includes trailblazers tackling the world’s most pressing issues. 

The Challenge: Unlocking Value from the Data 

Over the years, their global team has meticulously gathered a vast wealth of knowledge through approximately 4,000 Fellow selection processes, creating one of the world’s largest and most valuable repositories of social innovation. This treasure trove, spanning almost 20,000 pages of data and stories, documents the journeys of social entrepreneurs who have created groundbreaking solutions across education, healthcare, and the environment. 

This vast amount of data was structured and stored in a complex system where users could only perform syntactic searches, limiting the access to meaningful insights needed to foster collaborations and innovations.

 

Using AI to Navigate the Vast Data Landscape

As a first step towards a better solution, Ashoka’s AI Lab developed a series of prototypes that showed great promise but also had significant limitations. While advanced filtering and configuration options made finding and accessing data possible, the lack of a user-friendly interface made the tool inaccessible for anyone outside the AI Lab. 

As awareness of the tool spread, the AI Lab became inundated with requests from the entire organization that had to be processed by a handful of people. This approach quickly became a critical bottleneck, making it clear that the prototypes, while innovative, were simply not sustainable, much less scalable. 


Enter Tooploox: Developing a User-Friendly Interface for the AI Solution  

It became clear that for the AI tools to be usable by everyone at Ashoka, it required a new graphical, web-based interface with a professional UX/UI design. That’s when Ashoka’s AI Lab turned to us at Tech To The Rescue with the request to find a pro-bono tech partner for this project. 

Enter Tooploox, a leading AI software company in Poland, who saw this challenge as the perfect opportunity to use their expertise for good. “We were looking for a partner aligned with our expertise and interests,” says Katarzyna Kozyra, project manager at Tooploox. 

The Tooploox team approached the challenge with remarkable depth. They conducted comprehensive user research and interviewed stakeholders from across Ashoka’s organization to ensure that their tool could handle all of Ashoka’s needs.

“This project allowed us to explore new territories,” Katarzyna explained. “Designing a user interface for generative AI was uncharted ground, exciting and full of potential.” Before ChatGPT became a household name, there were no established best practices for AI user interface design. Tooploox was pioneering something new, creating an interface that could make artificial intelligence feel intuitive and accessible.


How Good Design Creates new Use-Cases for GenAI tools 

Today, any staff member in Ashoka can explore data about Ashoka Fellows and social innovations with a few keystrokes, using a user-friendly interface, and via an API integrated into other applications.

Photo source: Ashoka AI Lab

 

For example, selection committees can now perform social innovation benchmarks against 4.000 social entrepreneurs in one minute. Communication teams can curate media briefs based on article drafts, and staff members can identify potential collaboration partners for Fellows pretty much any social impact area and goal.

“A big thank you to Tooploox from the Ashoka AI Lab! We had a bunch of prototypes to process information about our ~4,000 Fellows. Tooploox turned these prototypes into a unified application with a shiny user-interface and an API. The team went above and beyond what anybody could expect from a pro bono partnership and only stopped when everything was working on our servers.” Odin Mühlenbein, Co-Founder of the Ashoka AI Lab. 

Photo source: Ashoka AI Lab


The Unique Experience of Investing in Pro-bono Tech Projects 

“For our team, this wasn’t just a project,” Katarzyna from Tooploox shared. “It was a chance to turn waiting time into a meaningful learning experience, to contribute to solving real-world problems.” The project became an opportunity for junior developers and team members between projects to engage in meaningful work, turning potential downtime into a learning and impact-driven experience.

At Tech To The Rescue, we believe technology is most powerful when it serves real impact. “We don’t just match nonprofits with tech companies. We listen to the real needs of impact organisations from across the world, and we identify tech companies that are sensitive to the cause, as well as have the technical capacity to take on the pro-bono project, and give it the attention, expertise and urgency it deserves”, says Mara Puacz, Head of Growth at Tech To The rescue. “We create ecosystems of impact via technology. Tech teams gain invaluable experience working on meaningful projects, while non-profits receive solutions that can revolutionize their work.”

In a world often divided by boundaries – of geography, resources, and understanding – this project proves that collaboration can transcend those limitations. It’s a testament to the power of intentional connection, a reminder that every line of code, every interface design, can be a catalyst for global change.

Is your tech company ready to join the pro-bono movement? Join Tech To The Rescue and let us find your next impact project!

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