IT assessment, planning & implementation plan to scale non-profit organization focused on training teachers committed to measurable results.

Urban Teacher Center (UTC) is an education-focused non-profit founded in 2010 to train teachers committed to measurable results. Based on its initial successes, UTC was interested in expanding its operations in scale and scope. Safal was asked to assess UTC’s IT needs and recommend a three-year plan. UTC retained Safal to recommend a comprehensive three-year technology strategy to support their operations as they scaled up their teacher preparation programs. Safal conducted a detailed organization-wide assessment to gather and define requirements, conducted vendor interviews to understand current market offerings and developed metrics and processes to measure progress against goals. Recommendations spanned basic technology requirements like email and calendaring to more advanced and customized offerings such as a Learning Management System to enable better online training and a data warehousing system to maintain and track program data. Key accomplishments: (1) Detailed needs assessment based on in-depth interviews with key organization staff and Board members and review and analysis of several documents outlining UTC’s current and future plans; (2) This analysis was supplemented by a thorough benchmarking exercise with other non-profits at similar and more evolved stages of development; (3) Based on this needs assessment, Safal recommended a comprehensive approach and implementation plan, including a vendor assessment, estimated budgets, and a timeline for implementation that delineated immediate priorities from long term ones; (4) Safal assessed the capacity of UTC’s internal IT team and made recommendations on how the capacity of the team could be augmented, either internally or via partial outsourcing.