HomeMaid
How the Inner Development Goals is scaling a global grassroots movement using Howspace
Challenge
Coordinating a global explosion
- Scaling communication: The Inner Development Goals (IDG) initiative needed to effectively communicate with and support a rapidly growing global network of volunteer coordinators, which expanded from 30 to nearly 800 local “hubs” in just a few years.
- Enabling knowledge sharing: A system was required to enable peer-to-peer learning, allowing hubs from different parts of the world to share successes and best practices.
- Maintaining engagement: The movement had to ensure its decentralized network of volunteers felt heard, involved, and empowered to maintain a sense of shared purpose and co-creation.
Solution
A central backbone for a decentralized network
- Unified digital platform: IDG adopted Howspace as the central digital backbone for its “Hubs and Networks” program, bringing all volunteer coordinators into a single, shared workspace.
- Multi-faceted engagement: The platform is used for onboarding new coordinators, hosting global community events, facilitating “Hub Dialogs” for knowledge sharing, and extending the value of their annual summit by engaging participants before, during, and after the event.
- Seamless communication: Howspace’s features, including its built-in translation, have been crucial for breaking down language barriers and enabling transparent, two-way communication across a diverse, global community.
Results
Connection, collaboration, and concrete action
- Enabled explosive growth: Howspace provided the essential infrastructure that allowed the IDG movement to successfully manage its exponential growth.
- Fostered global collaboration: The platform has directly connected individuals worldwide, leading to tangible new projects and collaborations, such as a successful Erasmus funding application between members in Sweden and Austria.
- Increased participation and engagement: By prioritizing transparency and co-creation, Howspace has helped IDG maintain high levels of engagement, making volunteers feel truly involved and influential in the movement’s direction.
The Inner Development Goals (IDG) is a non-profit initiative providing an open-source framework of transformative skills for sustainable development. Designed to complement the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, the IDGs focus on cultivating the inner capacities needed to tackle the world’s most complex challenges. What started as a research project has blossomed into a worldwide grassroots movement, powered by a global network of volunteers organizing in local communities.
Scaling a network from 30 to 800 while uniting a global community for collaboration and learning
“The advantage with Howspace is that everything is already packaged for us. Without it, we would have had to stitch together multiple systems for email, file sharing, and information. Instead, we have one simple platform where members can see upcoming events, access shared resources, and stay connected.”
As the IDG movement gained incredible momentum, it faced a critical challenge. The number of local communities, or “hubs,” exploded from around 30 in mid-2022 to nearly 800 across 100 countries today. This exponential growth presented a significant challenge: how to support and coordinate a rapidly expanding, decentralized global community. The core team needed a way to communicate at scale, foster knowledge sharing between hubs in different corners of the world, and maintain a sense of shared purpose and participation, ensuring volunteers felt heard, involved, and empowered.
The solution came in the form of a central digital backbone. The IDG initiative has used Howspace as its core digital platform almost since the beginning of its global expansion. Howspace provides the digital infrastructure for the “Hubs and Networks” program, which is the very heart of the grassroots movement. “Howspace has been crucial for this growth,” says Pontus Holmgren, Global IDG Hubs co-ordinator, who coordinates the global network of hubs. “It’s the backbone for us to meet and coordinate. It’s the one place where we can meet and find each other.”
Leif Grytenius, who coordinates the Gävle hub in Sweden, highlighted how essential Howspace has been for their local work: “The advantage with Howspace is that everything is already packaged for us. Without it, we would have had to stitch together multiple systems for email, file sharing, and information. Instead, we have one simple platform where members can see upcoming events, access shared resources, and stay connected.” For a volunteer network, having this unified infrastructure has been key to keeping momentum alive.
All hub coordinators are brought together in a single Howspace workspace, which serves as a comprehensive library for meeting recordings, presentations, and resources, ensuring complete transparency and accessibility. The platform is used to onboard new coordinators and to manage regular global community events. Through “Hub Dialogs” hosted on Howspace, successful hubs are spotlighted, allowing them to share their stories and best practices with the entire global community, a process made seamless by the platform’s built-in translation feature.
For the annual IDG Summit, Howspace plays a crucial role in extending the event’s impact far beyond the days of the conference itself. What began as a yearly gathering has evolved into an ongoing global experience, one that participants can join from anywhere in the world. Thanks to Howspace, thousands of digital participants have been able to actively engage in the Summit, interact with speakers and peers, and contribute to the conversations in real time. Over the past few years, more than 10,000 people from around the globe have joined the event digitally, experiencing the inspiration and collaboration of the Summit without geographical limits.
But the true value doesn’t end when the live sessions close. Through Howspace, participants can revisit and relive the entire conference, accessing recordings from the main stage and most of the workshops long after the event concludes. The platform has become a living archive, a digital treasure trove where the knowledge, reflections, and energy of the Summit remain accessible year-round. This ongoing access radically increases the value of a digital ticket and turns the Summit from a one-time event into a continuous space for learning, reflection, and connection. As Christian Frick from the IDG team describes, “We can see that people keep coming back, watching recordings, engaging in discussions, and reconnecting with others they met during the event. The platform keeps the dialogue alive and the community connected.
Sustainable growth through a unified and engaged community
By providing this unified digital home, Howspace has enabled the IDG movement to scale effectively while strengthening its grassroots foundation. The platform facilitates the rapid expansion of the movement by providing essential infrastructure. It also fosters global collaboration, connecting individuals who would not otherwise have met, which has resulted in concrete new projects. For Christian Frick, Digital Experience, who manages the digital experience for IDG’s conferences, transparency is the most important benefit. “It’s important that people feel involved,” he says. “If you don’t feel like you can participate and influence things, or that we can co-create, then engagement dies.”
Howspace has proven to be the key to keeping that engagement alive, creating a dynamic space for dialogue and co-creation within a thriving global community.
Curious to see how Howspace can support your learning initiatives? Book a demo today and discover the power of Howspace for yourself.
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