The Other Way Around

BeMo, the product my co-founder, Becky Kern, and I are building for nonprofits, has had four named apps on its screen since the day it opened: FunderStorm for funding, Amplify for communications, Compass for strategy, Academy for learning. You picked one, worked in it, and switched to another when the work changed. I have been going back through what I published while we were building it, checking each claim against what building taught. This article is about those four original apps, because they are going away, and about the sentence from last October that explains why.

What I claimed

The original article that opened my series on our design framework carried the subtitle "One Design Framework. Four Apps. Compounding Returns." It described the apps as rooms: "they're not meant to feel like four separate houses on the same block. They're designed to feel like four rooms in the same home." And it made a promise about who the rooms were for. The framework, I wrote, "ensures the apps adapt to the organization, not the other way around."

What real use showed

We have spent a summer watching people use the beta version of BeMo, and three things kept happening.

Nobody used the app names. In our file of the lines beta users have written to us, the word for the product is BeMo, every time. One executive director built her annual report in the app we called Amplify, wrote up the whole experience for us, and described it as doing the report "entirely in BeMo."

In demos, when the screen changed color from one app to the next, we watched people stop and ask where they were. The names were not carrying the work. When we finally looked at our own code, the apps barely existed. Set what runs Compass beside what runs Amplify and the only differences are the name, the web address, and the color. Where BeMo keeps what an organization knows, nothing was ever filed by app.

We listened, and then we changed it.

The lights

Here is the analogy to describe what we originally felt. Early on, we walked into a dark room and bumped into four pieces of furniture. Grants first, because funding is the first pain any nonprofit names, so that piece became FunderStorm. Then communications, then strategy, then training. We named what we hit, in the order we hit it.

Throughout the beta we had noticed there was more in the room than four things. Programs, the mission work itself, the people, the operations, or who the organization is had nowhere to live.

We had it backwards. The rooms were the shape of our discovery, not the shape of their organization.

What changed

BeMo is where a nonprofit's knowledge lives: what it knows about itself, what it knows about the funders and peers around it, and how the two connect. It is also where the work gets done, in one place.

Inside the product, nothing changes and nothing anyone has made moves. The way BeMo keeps your work does not change, so there is nothing to migrate. The change arrives in stages: Becky and I run it first, then our beta users get it for a few days before it becomes everyone's BeMo. What you will see is one BeMo. The templates become one catalog with categories, the way you already navigate any large catalog. The skills training section, Academy, keeps its name as the library. And the home screen will be organized the way a nonprofit already thinks about itself, and it is what we are building now.

BeMo is not a donor database, a grant tracker, an email platform, or a set of financial books. It sits above the tools you already run, and they keep their jobs. Connecting to them, so that what each one holds becomes one thing BeMo knows, is the work in front of us. The delta in one sentence: I promised apps that adapt to the organization, built four rooms shaped like our own discovery instead, and a summer of watching real use is turning BeMo into one place, arranged the way a nonprofit already thinks, where its knowledge lives and its work gets done.