How can I change the world?
Unlocking the answer to this crucial question is the ultimate pursuit of every nonprofit and social impact team, encapsulated within their mission statement. However, astonishingly, less than 1% of organizations worldwide possess the necessary tools and knowledge to realize the change they aspire to bring about.
This discrepancy arises because it's not a matter of simply tallying the number of trees planted, the percentage of children accessing education, or the volume of plastic extracted from the environment. The solutions for reducing carbon emissions, ensuring equitable education, or ending the plastic pollution crisis don't come with straightforward, step-by-step maps. While quantitative outputs are important, they alone fail to navigate the winding path from numbers to mission achievement. But now, a groundbreaking solution has emerged...
Introducing b.world's AI-enabled program designer—an innovation that allows you to design your journey towards world-changing impact with a single click. This remarkable application contextualizes your project definition, harnesses the power of Open AI, and generates a visual map connecting your overarching goal, intermediate objectives, targeted activities, and quantifiable indicators that enable you to track progress along the way. And better yet, it only takes seconds to draft with AI.
Discover more about this transformative capability as you continue reading and experience it firsthand by signing up for a no-obligation trial at b.world. Start charting your path to changing the world today.
Auto-Generating Draft Logframes
Since the launch of our initial artificial intelligence (AI) functionality in b.world last month, we have been hard at work learning from use and continuing to incorporate AI into b.world in new and meaningful ways. Also powered by ChatGPT on Microsoft’s OpenAI platform, we’re proud to announce that it’s now possible to auto-generate a draft logframe in b.world’s Whiteboard with the click of one button (check out the ‘Draft with AI’ button with the magic wand symbol above the palette of objects on the left-hand side of the Whiteboard canvas). This functionality leverages context from a b.world Project Overview to generate a draft logframe (sometimes called a project framework, logic model, theory of action, or results framework). With the click of one more button—‘Add to Logframe,’ —your design is transferred to b.world's Logframe where you can refine your timeline, indicator design, and begin collecting quantifiable and qualitative results data.
The capacity-building potential of this functionality is objectively profound: by providing suggested language for goals, objectives, activities, and their respective indicators, it eliminates hours—even days—of time from drafting logframes from scratch.
Moreover, the auto-generated model serves as a teaching tool for social impact professionals regardless of their level of experience, and it cuts through the “blank canvas syndrome,” or the writer’s block that holds so many teams back from program efficacy. It's equally important to state that none of this is intended to undermine or undervalue the human experience, skill, commitment to equity, or insight that may still be needed to review and adapt the model to ensure the approach is mission-aligned with your organization and strategically aligned with your portfolio of projects.
The key word to remember is "draft." It is possible to edit and delete all auto-generated language, as well as the lines connecting the elements on the canvas, and combine auto-generated content with manual additions. Auto-generated connections are denoted by dotted lines connecting elements together whereas human made connections can only be represented by solid lines.
Additionally, if you’d like for the AI engine to take another pass at generating a draft logframe while preserving any content that you’ve chosen to leave on the canvas, simply click the ‘Draft with AI’ button again for fresh content.
This innovation is what we meant when we said, at the founding of threshold.world in 2018, that technology's role in improving the state of the world was just beginning. We are anxious to continue cautiously experimenting with AI with the goal of b.world being a conduit for doing more good, more quickly, while increasing the quality of work, ensuring participants’ voices are included, and providing an environment where learning from your and others’ work is not only encouraged, but celebrated.
Whiteboard Aesthetic Enhancements
In this release, we also wanted to highlight that our whiteboard canvas has a number of aesthetic improvements to enhance the user experience and eliminate known pain points.
Full-Screen View and Auto-Zoom
Whiteboard canvasses are now available as a full-screen view with automatic zoom-to-fit functionality. This means that you have more available real estate to work with to design your projects. Simply click the back arrow next to ‘All Whiteboards’ at the top left of the screen to access the other whiteboard canvasses for your project and the rest of the b.world app. Additionally, upon load, the whiteboard canvas will auto-adjust the zoom level so that all content is in-view by default and you don’t have to pan on the canvas to search for your content.
Button Placement
We have moved the position of the zoom and pan controls to the bottom of the screen, and the ‘Add to Logframe’ button now sits beneath the logframe preview panel on the right-hand side of the whiteboard canvas. The pan control is also much smaller. Additionally, we moved the placement of the Guide button—which contains helpful information on interacting with the Whiteboard as well as definitions for key terms in the Whiteboard and Logframe—to the left-hand side, to the make room for the ‘Add to Logframe’ button. The goal of these button changes is to improve the overall user experience of the Whiteboard feature in b.world.
Minor Bug Fixes and UI Enhancements
Global Stories: Creating a story in a team without any projects no longer results in an error message.
Global Stakeholders-Organizations: When a location is added to an ‘organization’ stakeholder, it now appears in the Locations column.
Project Elements: Attempting to delete a global indicator that’s connected to a project no longer results in an error message.
Project Elements: It’s no longer possible to edit global indicators which are attached to a project.
Project Tasks: There is now a section on task cards to enter notes.
Project Stories: Any story whose content was generated using AI is watermarked at the bottom with a message indicating this.
Project Stories: Insights were not always appearing in the ‘Available Content’ panel. This is no longer an issue.
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 app. If you're new to b.world, check out the platform's functionality for yourself by signing up for a free 30-day trial here! Thank you for your ongoing involvement and insight as we strive to design and build a better world with b.world for you and your social impact colleagues around the world.
Questions or demo requests? info@threshold.world
Press inquiries? dan@threshold.world