This whole Coronavirus situation is not ideal, is it?

I mean, the spring’s already here and we have to refrain from doing most springy things, like having a beer with your pals on the river bank, switching from indoors basketball to outdoors or going to the first open-air shows of the year.

Instead, we need to stay inside as much as possible. It’s important, then, to spend your time meaningfully, especially the weekends. Otherwise, it’s too easy to lose yourself in a deadly combo of Netflix and the fridge. I stumbled upon that meaning on a Friday morning when walking Luna around the neighbourhood for her morning rituals.

Luna is actually quite happy that I don’t go to the office these days

I was listening to the news on national radio. The Minister for Education was talking about the challenges of quarantine for the Lithuanian school system. “35,000 children will not be able to access education remotely since they don’t have enough computers in their household”, he said, amongst other things.

“Well, I’ll be damned. I have a spare laptop lying around” — I thought — “I should just give it to someone in need”. It seemed like a no-brainer thing to do.

But then the sneaky Product Manager in me asked: “OK, but how do I scale this?”. One laptop surely won’t cut it. And, frankly, I wasn’t sure whether it was still working at all.

I had been working behind a MacBook ever since I graduated from the university: first in an ad agency then in tech companies. I guess everyone who had a similar career path will agree: whatever the company does — if it’s main added value is created digitally, they have spare computers lying around.

So the main challenge became clear. Someone should enable such companies to donate their old, yet working computers to children in need. Sure, someone.

Treatwell Together

Next thing I know, I’m typing a call to arms in our Treatwell #vilnius Slack channel. “There’s a hackathon this weekend to solve Coronavirus related issues; there’s this problem with 35,000 kids; I’ve got an idea, you know, how there are laptops lying around everywhere and we just need to ‘Robinhood’ them to families in need and… Please join me and we will figure this out” (author’s note: not a literal translation).

Oddly enough, the incoherent blabbering worked and suddenly we had a whole new Slack channel to discuss our approach, with around a dozen Treatwellers on it. We set up a quick call to discuss what could be done. In 15 minutes there’s a decision — we commit to establishing a pipeline for businesses to donate the computers. And we’ll do this as a team in HackTheCrisis.lt hackathon. By the time the event started, we had some non-Treatwellers joining the cause because I spent some time copy-pasting my incoherent pitch here and there.

Roles and Tracks

Hackathons are usually seen as events for developers or creatives only. I’ve taken part in one or two before this and can truly say that nothing can be farther from the truth.

In my experience, hackathon results are directly based on the skillset of the team’s individuals. If the team is full of developers — it’s likely they’ll come up with something technically impressive. If you throw in a designer or two, the result might even be pretty. An analyst, a copywriter, even a Product Manager can help too. But there’s no need to worry if there are 0 developers within the team, you can still solve the problem.

In our team we had 1 developer and more than 10 people ready to do something else, it was clear that we need to have roles. Needless to say, Dominykas as a sole developer was made responsible for all things tech. Ornela, our Agile Coach, took leadership in coordinating the workflows and conference calls. Greta the People Manager took care of government relations (they’re people too, after all). I did some MVP scoping and tried to keep everyone updated with the latest changes and requirements. Everyone brought something different to the table.

We split our work and idea into three tracks with a clear vision of what we need to achieve in each.

• Product — create a beautiful website where businesses can register to donate their hardware to children in need
• Outreach — ensure the influx of donated computers by reaching out directly to decision-makers in IT companies.
• Institutional relations — coordinate with the ministry for Education so they would be ready to take donations in and distribute them

Product

We realised pretty early on that a simple website would do: all we need is a powerful statement to sell the idea and a way for companies to commit to donations.

Soon enough a slogan was established: “Quarantine will not stop the education. Lack of computers can”. I personally think that this one-liner has a great balance: it’s understandable, inspirational and actionable. The one thing we could still work on is its English translation.

As for the way for companies to register, we simply created a Google Form, where each entry goes to people responsible within the Ministry of Education.

Then came the nice-to-haves:

We understood the need for displaying the benefactors’ logos early on: tactics, also known as Peer Pressure. Also, testimonials from government officials and educational NGOs gave the product the needed credibility to kickstart the hardware-raising. We secured those via our Institutional track.

You can take a look here: www.mokyklanamuose.lt

Product Technology

A quick side note, as this is a Tech blog, I think it’s really important to address the tech side of things. So here it goes:

We used WIX.

Outreach

Vilnius IT scene has some tribal qualities to it. It seems that everybody knows everyone or have worked together at some point. Worst case scenario, you always know someone who knows someone.

Our idea was then simple and based on several ‘ifs’:

• if you know someone, text an elevator pitch to them directly.
• If you know someone who knows someone— ask the first someone to do the same thing.

“Someone” in this particular case is a decision-maker: someone who can make a company donate computers quickly. With these tactics, we easily came up with a spreadsheet of 100+ CEO, CTO, CIO level folx in tech companies and everyone who knows those someones.

We also struck a partnership with an up and coming youtube celebrity — a 12-year-old Simonas, whose previous hit was “How to set up Discord for remote education”. He came up with a perfect video.

Institutional relations

With the other two tracks, we were pretty sure we’ll get donation commitments, pretty soon. The whole logistics side of things — how to actually bring computers to the families in need — was the biggest blank spot in our blueprints. It’s not as simple as one might think: there’s matching supply with demand, physical transportation, legal issues, etc.

This could not have been solved by our team over the weekend.

So we called someone who knows someone and got the Ministry Chancellor’s number. His blessing for us to work on Supply-side of things (and leaving all the rest to figure out along the way) has allowed us to be laser-focused on our Product and Outreach tracks.

Do you know what we call this in Product Management?

Limiting the scope.

Snowball effect

Working on this idea under the hackathon umbrella has helped to attract really skillful and connected people to join the cause.

First, the newcomers really helped with the Outreach. Since the idea itself got traction, it became s way easier to get new companies to join or to convince the press to write about mokyklanamuose.lt.

We now have a much wider team than what we started with. Our new members — from the media, NGOs and elsewhere — help to take care of the project in a post-hackathon world. They have essentially moved our grassroots organisation to new heights.

Every hour we get the news of a new donation from another tech company, a new partnership with the media or a new idea on how to take things from here.

The result

Here’s where things stand now:

• We currently have a well functioning website for donations www.mokyklanamuose.lt
• We have raised 100k euro in commitments to buy new hardware to children
• We have 450 older computers that will be distributed in the upcoming days
• We have all these companies on board (and many more coming):

• The president of Lithuania mentioned this initiative in his press conference
• We have partnerships with the national broadcaster LRT and leading media outlets (they have banners leading to our site)
• We have media planning and content agencies helping us with the further build up the narrative in the media and social networks. They’re doing this pro bono.
• At least two big donations will be filmed and shown via national TV in the upcoming days.

And all of the above calls for…

Thanks

Big thanks go to everyone in Treatwell Vilnius who believed in the idea and joined the cause on Friday, namely: Dovi, Dominykas, Gedas, Dalia, Kestas, Ornela, Dominykas, Martynas, Greta, Marija, and others.

Thank you to Evaldas and Darius: they’re the guys who know the guys

Thank you, Ashlyn. You made me write this blog post.

Thanks to everyone who doesn’t work in Treatwell but has joined the cause and taken it to new heights: Erika from Inventi, Milda from Herbertus, Andzelika from Junior Achievement Lietuva, Giedre from SEB, Simona and Simonas, Vytautas, Raminta and Ulijona from Bosanova and literally everyone else. There’s so many of you.

Thanks to everyone who donated computers or who are still looking at how your company can help. You are the real MVPs.

And thank you for reading. Please consider donating at www.mokyklanamuose.lt

Stay healthy,