This release of b.world focuses on nonprofit and social impact teams' need to amplify the voice of change through impact storytelling. With new abilities to add narrative Insights to any part of a project, easily include those Insights and other content like outcome graphs and videos in a story, and publish impact stories with a single click, it's easier than ever to share how your work accelerates change! Coupled with b.world's new document upload feature, your program team can retain the knowledge you earn and mobilize support throughout the program lifecycle. Read on for more details!
Add Insights anywhere in b.world: Our b.world community has taught us that much of the learning gained during program design and implementation is lost because program teams don't have a centralized place to record and share insights when they happen. b.world's latest release solves this challenge by enabling you to record and organize insights anywhere throughout the project lifecycle - from design through results. You can record observations, feedback, quotes, assumptions, risks, decisions, and learning right in the context of your project! These Insights can be easily viewed by your whole team in a convenient Insights panel which takes just one click to open on the right-hand side of the screen.
Save time by adding Project content to stories: Prior to now, you could easily pull Project Title, Summary, Location, Challenge Statement and Proposed Solution into a story. With this release, you can also drag and drop all logframe and Insights content into a story! You can also search for relevant content with a search panel. We know this feature will save you time so you can allocate more effort to achieving outcomes!
Create Your Own story: b.world now offers the freedom to ‘Create Your Own’ story without using an existing b.world story template so you can customize the story you want to tell! We've added this new story type to the existing story templates (see below), each of which helps you combine narrative, results, and images/video into stories that amplify the voice of change.
Consolidate key content with Documents for Projects & Indicators: The new Documents tab on each project enables uploading documents to the project and to each project indicator. This enables you to ensure your results data, project and grant reports, and any other content are centrally stored within your project. Regardless of where documents are uploaded, they are all accessible from the central Documents tab, creating a seamless and streamlined Documents experience! Upcoming releases will enable even more robust document functionality: attaching documents to other places in the interface, opening and editing documents whereby changes are saved directly back to b.world, listing links to documents which live in 3rd-party applications, and simultaneously searching content across multiple documents that have been uploaded to b.world.
Project Budgets have been enhanced!:
This b.world release offers a major visual and functional refresh of Project Budgets so you can better define expected budgets during project design and track expenses when implementing. Key updates include:
Different currencies: When creating a budget, b.world offers the option to choose from a set of the popular currencies including but not limited to U.S. Dollars, Euros and British Pounds. This currency will be applied to all budget items within that project, though a different currency can be selected for each project.
Category visuals: This release introduces the ability to see a visual breakdown of categories per budget item. For example, if one of your budget items is Travel Expenses, and your categories are Accommodations, Transportation and Food, the category visual will show a breakdown of expenses by these three categories. Previously, b.world only showed expense breakdowns at the budget item level.
Overbudget alerts: For any given budget item, if the sum of transactions exceeds the planned budget, the budget item will be flagged in red.
Above: New ‘Budget’ design
Bug Fixes and Minor UI Improvements
Projects page: Search/filtering mechanism has been reverted to the former style, so only content that matches search criteria appears on the screen instead of highlighting relevant results.
Logframe: The Logframe page design has been updated to assist with readability and for additional visual appeal. Additionally, ‘Copy from’ on the Indicator Setup screen is no longer active for an indicator once the indicator has any results entered, and adjustments have been made to the indicator results charts so that the data is displayed and scaled appropriately.
Whiteboard: Even though it’s impossible to tell on the surface, the backend of the Whiteboard has been completely rewritten to offer additional stability, and to set the platform up to offer additional functionality in upcoming releases. Stay tuned for updates!
Stories: The screen where users select the desired story type has been updated to accommodate the new ‘Create Your Own’ story type.
Project Elements: It’s now possible to add disaggregates with the same names, but on different dimensions.
Miscellaneous: Toast notifications have been redesigned to better match b.world branding.
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 platform. If you're new to b.world, check out a video overview of the platform here and then sign up for a free 30-day trial here! Thank you for your ongoing involvement and insight as we strive to design and build the best b.world we can for you and your social impact colleagues around the world.