Frontline turned 10 years old over last week! As we recover from all the Halloween candy and birthday cake in Nairobi, I wanted to take a moment and tell you a little bit about what has changed at Frontline, and what hasn’t. Over the last decade, we’ve changed leadership, structure, and product – but what hasn’t changed is our values. Here are 5 of our favorites:
Technology Design is a Political Statement. Every design decision favors a group of people or a type of behavior, as well as a system of control and ownership. We build for configurability, but more importantly, we build for the world we want.
User Champions. Our users are champions, they deserve a champion of their own. Market forces are moral issues, and we champion our users’ interests everywhere we go. We believe that data ownership matters, that vendor lock-in is a social justice issue, and that, no matter who’s sending it, spam is spam.
Build for Common. We prioritize the world’s most used engagement channels because everyone left behind today is a divide we could have prevented tomorrow. If we’re going to build a common future, we have to reach everyone.
Connect. There are too many things that separate systems – language, location, performance indicators, laws, adoption, business models, and even fear. Frontline is a hub to connect systems, and a tool to overcome whatever is separating the things we need from the people who need them.
Access + Efficiency = Impact. Our social impact philosophy is built on empowered collective action. We drive impact by building tools to help people improve the systems around them, themselves. The more equitable and efficient the world’s most vital systems, the better off we are.
We still get out of bed every morning to build openly accessible mobile tools to help connect people with the organizations, information, and goods they need most. That, as it turns out, is complicated, so the company and the software have grown a lot.
As a software, Frontline has grown a LOT. In the last two months alone, we’ve released four brand new versions of Frontline: Frontline + Radio, Frontline + NationBuilder, Frontline + Campaigns, and Frontline + Alerts. Each of these versions incorporates the best practices and designs we’ve seen over the last decade, from hundreds of users. These build on our core architecture of FrontlineCloud, FrontlineSync, and FrontlineSMS – each of which are designed for different, connected use cases.
Frontline is releasing 10 new versions of the toolset to celebrate - with one custom version for each year. Our Activity Templates are customized to our most popular uses, and integrate a bunch of new platforms, starting with NationBuilder, Salesforce, and Zapier - and, as the song would say, ‘to many more…’
Even though we’re not supposed to, we just want you to know that our wish is that you, our users, continue to build a better world with Frontline. We’ll keep building a better Frontline.