Overview

For over 150 years, the German Red Cross has seen it as its task to provide comprehensive assistance to people in conflict situations, disasters, and health or social emergencies. This is what the more than 177,000 employees and 435,000 volunteers stand for in the most diverse areas of work, such as rescue and health services, disaster relief or social care providers.

Problem

As a modern, future-oriented aid organisation, the German Red Cross is continuously working on digital and analog offerings in order to be able to provide assistance even faster, in a more targeted and humane manner. Employees and volunteers alike contribute new, diverse and innovative ideas every day to make the work in the 19 state associations, almost 500 district associations, 31 sisterhoods and more than 4,500 local associations more modern. Due to the size of the association, it is particularly important to bring together contact persons from a wide variety of association members. The idea was to create an attractive member platform in order to visualise innovation ideas and projects, to offer attention, reach and the opportunity to participate, and to network interested parties and those involved in a targeted manner. With this in mind, the DRK turned to the Digital Transformation Lab.

Approach

In the summer semester of 2021, a group of students from the Marketing Management master's degree program at the Faculty of Business Administration dedicated themselves to the project "Innovation Hub for the DRK" and developed proposed solutions for a Germany-wide networking platform for innovations and innovators. The group of students was divided into four teams, each of which addressed one of the four aspects of participation, networking, visualisation and implementation during the challenge.

Dr. Beate Rottkemper and Bettina Stuffer from the DRK accompanied the project and were in intensive exchange with the student teams. Susanne Bruch, officer for "Social Innovations and Digitalisation" and deputy head of the team for "Social Trends and Innovations" at the DRK General Secretariat, commented on the objective as follows: "The Innovation Hub gives our member associations the opportunity to present themselves with their innovative projects. In addition, it offers us the chance to show that we as a welfare association work in an innovative and future-oriented way."

The project was organised by DTLab as an Innovation Challenge and actively supported by Amazon Web Services (AWS). For example, AWS helped students target their ideas with its "Working Backwards" innovation methodology and many tips on technical implementation. In addition, AWS contributed to a successful and timely project by providing state-of-the-art cloud technologies.

Lars Schmitz from AWS, who as Digital Innovation Lead has already accompanied various Innovation Challenges at different faculties of HM, sums up: "I am impressed by the results. The students managed to get to grips with a complex problem in just three months, develop a joint product vision in four teams, implement it prototypically, and make recommendations to the DRC for the next steps. The satisfaction of the DRC speaks for itself!".

Ideas of the Team “Matching/ Networking”

The idea of the "Networking" team was to offer a matching system for motivated association members on the Innovation Hub member platform. The Innovation Hub is designed to search for projects and other innovators. However, finding like-minded members is not always easy and could be simplified through special calls for proposals. Project initiators could be authorised to post jobs for specific tasks of their project and members to create personalised profiles with specific interest details that can then be found by project leaders through a search function. Care should be taken to protect members' data by only allowing people internal to the association to view personal profiles and send messages. Who has just capacities free, this could indicate on its profile with a maximum number of hours or pause otherwise. The profiles of inactive users would not be deleted immediately. The interests that can be noted range across all areas of operation of the DRK and also cover areas such as business administration, IT and research. This would make it possible to network DRK club members across topics throughout Germany.

Next steps

In the future, the DRK would like to further expand the matching function and, for example, enable the addition of videos to profiles and forum groups for members with similar interests. Furthermore, there are plans for live events and workshops to create new project teams and better use of the given data through algorithms. It is for sure that the all-around successful project left everyone wanting more innovative collaborations in the future!