History

On March 11, 2008 World Vision, one of the leading NGO’s ($2.5B/year), gathered together 15 organizations to discuss the possibility of developing an inter-agency DM&E system that would benefit the entire non-profit industry. If successful, the system (code named “Spark”) would enable all non-profits the ability to capture impact data into a common platform and report back to donors. It is believed that providing higher quality and more transparent impact reports to donors will increase accountability and ultimately result in higher donations to the organizations that provide this information to it’s donors.

During the Spark conference, each organization presented its current DM&E strategy and timetable. There was amazing similarity between the organizations and each organization has a high priority on upgrading their current DM&E to a Web 2.0 platform. One of the huge opportunities around Spark is to improve the efficiency of gathering impact data at the field level. Each of these organizations has hundreds of projects located in different countries around the world. This makes it extremely difficult in capturing data consistently and using the same quantitative and qualitative monitoring standards.

In August 2008, World Vision and the Kay Family Foundation partnered together to create the Spark “simulation,” in attempt to create a vision for what Spark would look like. The result is the Spark presentation, which you can view on the www.sparkhs.com website. The Spark presentation generated a common response, “Can Spark really be built? How long will it take? Who should build it?”  In March 2009, World Vision commissioned a feasibility study, which made the following recommendations:

• Create an independent low-profit company (L3C) with similar values to World Vision that would:

• Create end-to-end Humanitarian IT solutions that are:

• • Real-time,
  • Integrated multi-business line
  • Any-to-any connectivity
  • Leveraging social networking
  • And a “Turbo-tax” like DIME system

• Built for the Humanitarian Industry with World Vision as an early adopter

As a result of these recommendations, Univicity, L3C (U3) was formed on July 1, 2009. U3 is jointly owned by World Vision International, Kay Family Foundation, and the executive team of U3. On July 13, 2009, U3 board of directors met for the first time and agreed to create the entrepreneurial U3 leadership team.

On September 24-25, 2009, we conducted the first Univicity Leadership Forum, where we mapped out our partnership, product and go-to-market strategy.

On September 24, 2009, Univicity and Blackbaud signed a memorandum of understanding for Univicity to resell Blackbaud’s eCRM product as part of the SPARK G2