In 2023, AlleyCorp worked with Podsie, Trans Lifeline and Magpie Literacy as three of the four winners of Nonprofit ENG(INE).
Each of these organizations benefited from engineering and tech support in different ways to scale their impact. You can learn more about their mission and the ways they are utilizing new technology below.
“ENG(INE) helped us evolve from a one-person, scrappy setup to a well-structured team with a much higher chance of achieving our mission.”
Learn more about Podsie at https://www.podsie.org/
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Description text goes herePodsie's mission is to empower teachers and improve student learning outcomes by providing a free, user-friendly web app that makes it easy for them to leverage research-backed strategies in the classroom.
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Despite extensive research on effective teaching strategies, there's often a gap between this research and its implementation in classrooms. This gap means that students are not always benefiting from the best possible teaching methods. By making research-backed strategies easily accessible and actionable for teachers, Podsie ensures that students can achieve their fullest potential.
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Podsie partnered with ENG(INE) because we wanted to significantly scale up our impact, and ENG(INE) provided the necessary capacity and expertise to achieve that. Before partnering with ENG(INE), our team consisted of only one full-time employee. We were focused on building a free web app to help students receive personalized spaced review to remember what they learn in their classes.
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Working with ENG(INE) has been transformative for Podsie. The team helped us lay a much stronger foundation for developer experience and productivity, ensuring that our development processes are efficient and scalable. They set up an infrastructure for LLM-based features, dramatically enhancing the capabilities of our platform. ENG(INE) assisted us in fleshing out our hiring processes for product designers and engineers, which led to us hiring our first full-time designer and engineer, both of whom have been wonderful additions to our team. In essence, ENG(INE) helped us evolve from a one-person, scrappy setup to a well-structured team with a much higher chance of achieving our mission.
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Clearly define your project goals and be ready to collaborate closely with the ENG(INE) team to make the most of their expertise. Be prepared to document and share your existing tech stack to help them understand your needs quickly. Finally, emphasize how your project will scale your impact—focus on the tangible benefits for your target audience.
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Our mission is to unlock the great reader in every child through comprehensive, research-based, digital reading products.
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Literacy rates haven’t improved in decades. Individuals and whole communities are impacted by higher rates of incarceration, health risks, and limited social mobility—and it’s costing America $2.2 trillion per year. Existing tools and curriculum are outdated, difficult to use, and aren’t evolving fast enough.
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We are an ambitious nonprofit that sees high potential to leverage the best of technology to support all students to become great readers. We needed a partner with strong AI expertise to help us explore functionality in helping students match the skills they need to practice with specific texts. We partnered to build a text-to-skills mapper and a skills-to-text generator.
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We were successful in creating functionality that we can put into our product in the near future. And we took a quantum leap forward toward getting students the right texts at the right time!
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The simplest advice is to do it! But more specifically, make sure you're clear about what expertise you need to bring and what you need from ENGINE. Partnerships are ideal for exploring risky, creative, and high potential functionality. Because our comprehensive build will be made up of multiple microservices, we can compartmentalize specific elements, which is ideal for working with technical partners.
Learn more about Magpie Literacy at https://www.magpie.org/
“We needed a partner with strong AI expertise in helping students match the skills they need to practice with specific texts.”
“This project was desperately needed but not something we wanted to take on alone.”
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Trans Lifeline provides our trans peers with the connection, care, and advocacy we need and deserve.
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Trans people deserve the opportunity and resources to determine our own futures, to be given the chance to live meaningful lives, and to do so with dignity and confidence. We believe that all trans communities can be places of imagination, liberation, and joy– free of prisons and police.
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Trans Lifeline is currently reimagining our hotline with ENG(INE) to use modern technology to develop a synchronous and asynchronous chatline that increases our overall service capacity.
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Working with ENG(INE) will allow us to provide even better support to our trans peers. This project was desperately needed but not something we wanted to take on alone.
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Be honest and straightforward about the realities your organization is facing. Trust your gut! You know where your organization is heading and where you need help to get there.