IA Commits: An Initiative Case Study
Watching organizations thrive thanks to digital products we've designed and developed is enormously rewarding. Our team's talents, abilities, and empathetic approach to design, coding, and client support have made life easier and more enjoyable for millions of users.
As a natural extension of our lived values, we want to channel our resources into giving back to the community and causes we care about—causes like STEM, sustainability and the environment, mental health, diversity and inclusion, education, and first responders and frontline workers.
Company Mission and Team Feedback Serve as a Catalyst
From our first days as a company, the InspiringApps mission and values have been at the core of everything we do. Empathy, commitment, integrity, and inclusivity have enabled InspiringApps to work with hundreds of companies, providing strategic business solutions and immersive experiences that transform ideas into reality. Although we're proud of the work we've done, we're most honored by the influence our products have on the organizations we serve and their employees, customers, and communities as well.
Last year, we asked our team what initiatives made InspiringApps a Great Place to Work®. One idea quickly rose to the top of the list: the desire to give back. The fruit of this feedback is a new InspiringApps initiative: IA Commits. IA Commits helps our team and the organizations we support by:
- Enabling organizations to serve their audience through applying our team's expert technical skills and resources.
- Mentoring underrepresented and less experienced software developers while providing a clear plan to support more inclusive hiring.
- Doing purposeful, fulfilling work for the communities and causes we care about.
Our Process of Creating IA Commits
InspiringApps is proof that solid company culture fosters loyalty, creativity, and motivation. Almost half of our team has been working together for five years or longer. Along the way, we've created the environment, that made the IA Commits initiative possible: encouraging communication, welcoming ideas, and acting on feedback. As a result, many improvements in processes, branding, and more have been born.
We followed a time-tested process to develop and launch the IA Commits program. Collaborative from start to finish, our steps included:
- Analyzing survey feedback from our Great Place to Work Certification™ to gain insight into the vision team members were presenting.
- Hosting a brainstorming meeting following the survey, open to all InspiringApps employees, encouraging idea sharing.
- Formulating a high-level concept and strategy for our initiative.
- Creating a detailed plan that defines the initiative's service offering and recruiting program.
This process yielded a powerful impact—the formation of IA Commits.
An Inspired Solution: Service Offering and Training Program
IA Commits is a combination service offering and training program, filling the gaps in the current app development space and encompasses two avenues of giving back: (1) supporting non-profit organizations that need exceptional digital products and (2) providing opportunities for underrepresented developers to gain valuable experience.
But there's more to the name than meets the eye. IA Commits also represents one of our core values, Commitment, and is a play on the developer operation, Commit, that sends the latest source code changes to reveal an app's changes. In other words, the work we do reveals our commitment to change through providing our expertise to help benefit the communities we care deeply about.
“IA Commits offers affordable, safe, and reliable development services alongside exceptional opportunities through inclusive hiring practices—all while enhancing employee engagement.”
BRAD WEBER
President and CEO of InspiringApps
Community Support
Investing in a high-quality digital app can be costly and outside many non-profit and community organizations' budgets. With IA Commits, these organizations have the opportunity to launch their own digital products under the guidance and supervision of InspiringApps experts for a reduced cost. The impact of a beautifully designed, reliable digital product is immeasurable. Beyond this, and a key point we want to stress, is that community organizations can count on their new digital products to meet the high standards of every InspiringApps product.
This, in turn, opens up a new opportunity for InspiringApps to offer a service option to have your project completed on-shore, at a reduced price, under the guidance and supervision of experts who have been working at InspiringApps for over a decade in some cases. Although the timeline may be extended to support the learning of our apprentice team, we assure you will still receive a great-looking, reliable product that meets our high standards.
Training and Hiring
Software developers are in high demand. There are nearly 2 million opportunities for software developers, with an expected increase of 22% in the next five years. However, many companies expect years of experience or formal education to do the job, which are often out of reach for women and minorities in the industry.
Tech hiring is notoriously homogeneous, and InspiringApps has worked to diversify the team through inclusive hiring practices. IA Commits doubles down on our dedication to inclusivity by recruiting a diverse development team.
IA Commits aims to solve this problem by offering work-based training to less experienced developers, hands-on experience with talented developers and designers, and mentorship and training on new technologies. Our team hopes to train the next generation of tech talent and break down the barriers to entry into the tech space.
A key point of differentiation with our training program is the high level of supervision and mentorship, combined with innovative and flexible solutions that tap into our broad expertise. Subject matter experts will carefully supervise each new developer's work. We've fine tuned the application development process to create a collaborative work environment that avoids silos. With IA Commits, developers can apply their expertise to value-driven projects alongside fintech, medical, and other industry-specific work. Everyone benefits from our finish line, every time guarantee and uncompromising quality commitment.
Conclusion
We listen to our team because Inspired Employees Make InspiringApps. From the initial brainstorm to the launch of our first IA Commits client, the IA Commits initiative reflects the careful processes, creative thinking, and thorough planning we pour into every solution our team creates.