BeyondMe started life in 2013 as Young Philanthropy, with a mission to help young graduates entering corporate employment give their time, money and expertise to grassroots charities.

The organisation had already set up the most minimum of viable products, running the whole programme on email, spreadsheets and phone calls. While this validated the model, and proved it was a great idea, it was impossible to scale. Our first task was to work out how we could turn this idea into a scalable platform that would serve them for years to come.

Our approach started by looking at distributing the workload from the BeyondMe team to those most qualified to perform each task. For a lot of the platform, this meant building tools for humans - to set up their own donation plans, connect bank accounts through Stripe, and enter profile information. In other areas it meant building processes that allowed computers to do the kinds of things computers are good at - generating reports and syncing data across disparate systems. All of it was focussed around freeing up the BeyondMe team to do the kinds of things that only humans are good at - meeting people and organisations, mentoring and forming relationships. The living-document roadmap that we created at the very start of this engagement is still in use by Hactar and BeyondMe today as we continue to work together to constantly improve the offering.