Restructuring Podio to Unify a Distributed Advisory Team
House of Resources Berlin supports migrant-led organisations and associations working on integration and civic participation. A five-person team works across multiple locations, offering individual consultations, training, networking events, equipment loans, and micro-project grants.
The Challenge: Parallel Documentation Layers
The scope of work at House of Resources Berlin is wide — individual consultations, training programmes, networking events, equipment and room loans, and micro-project funding. All these dimensions of project work had long been documented in parallel, in separate silos. Connecting data across these layers to optimise advisory work required enormous manual effort.
The central goal: meaningfully increase the effectiveness of their Podio work. On one hand, reduce data entry time. On the other, increase the analytical value of what was being captured.
Specific functions to improve and integrate:
- Contact and organisation management (with the ability to link individuals to organisations, tracking an organisation's development even as different people are involved)
- Systematic documentation of advisory sessions and impact reports
- Systematic tracking of micro-funding grants
- Participant management for training events
- Networking activity documentation
- Equipment and room loan management
The Solution
Kollaborateure rebuilt and extended the Podio workspace. The complex cross-level connectivity was the decisive element — so that different types of support to the same organisation could be documented cohesively, regardless of which team member was involved. Information can now be filtered and recombined across every layer of House of Resources Berlin's work.
What was restructured
- Contact & organisation management
- Advisory session documentation
- Impact reporting
- Micro-funding grant tracking
- Training participant management
- Networking activity logs
- Equipment & room loan management
"Thanks to the skilled and creative configuration of our workspace by Kollaborateure, it is now possible to bring together knowledge and information from different team members so that advisory processes with organisations can be traced over longer periods — even when advisors change or different members of an association are involved. It makes team collaboration much easier and allows us to maintain and continue the quality of our project work regardless of location. Especially in the current situation, Podio has made it possible for us to remain operational despite contact restrictions due to COVID-19."
— Dr. Sulamith Hamra, House of Resources Berlin Project Lead, August 2020"The decisive factor is the complex cross-level connectivity configured by Kollaborateure. Where previously many parallel documentation layers were required, information can now be filtered and recombined across every layer of our advisory work to move processes forward in a focused way."
— Dr. Sulamith Hamra, House of Resources Berlin Project Lead, August 2020