Applying Process Improvement at the Open Media Foundation

Greetings from Open Media Foundation! We’re a non-profit in the Denver Santa Fe Arts District that is dedicated to putting the power of the media into the hands of the people. Open Media Foundation runs Denver Open Media, the public access TV station in Denver that rents equipment and teaches classes to nonprofits and community members. This year, five of our staff members became Black Belts through PEAK Academy, and in four short months, we’ve already begun to see a great increase in capacity!

Running a TV Station is a massive undertaking, and we are lucky to have such dedicated interns to help our staff out. In fact, the greatest skill we learned from Peak Academy was how to empower everyone by innovating solutions as a team. Interns and staff together “6S”-ed our Equipment Center, which resulted in a vast improvement in the efficiency of our rental process and reduced the average duration of nightly inventory checks down to 30 minutes.

We applied this dedication to collaboration in other areas as well: for example, we held an annual member meeting in which our members created an “Impact-Effort Matrix” alongside us. We now have several programs in the works that are responsive to what we know our members need, rather than what we think they need. Other innovations we employed to increase member participation include systems to incentivize member surveys and automate communications through Salesforce; experiments that have resulted in a 68% increase in the number of member surveys filled out!

Our Black Belt staff members have also applied much of what they learned to our internal processes. Gavin Dahl is our Account Executive for the Open Media Project for Government, which provides low-cost solutions for livestreaming government council meetings. He streamlined his process for managing potential leads and created a system for tracking and logging communications. Additionally, the team has created standardized training packages on Google AdWords and Salesforce that can be used to teach our own staff members or our non-profit and government clients. These innovations reflect a renewed commitment to spreading knowledge throughout the organization, rather than hoarding it in one person.

We at Open Media Foundation cannot be more thankful for the Peak Academy team for teaching us the tools to find creative, new solutions to old, stagnant problems. We can’t wait to tackle our next projects in the Education department!

This article was written by Alice Kassinger, AmeriCorps VIsta Member at Open Media Foundation

danielpeakacademy

Daniel joined the Peak Academy team in the summer of 2014. Daniel has his Bachelor of Arts degree in Bible & Theology from Simpson University in California, as well as a Masters of Public Administration from the University of Colorado, Denver. Daniel served for two years in the AmeriCorps VISTA program in New York City where he was involved in various community and disaster preparedness programs with World Vision and the American Red Cross. Daniel has also taught English overseas in Suwon, South Korea. Daniel lives in Lone Tree, Colorado with his wife, and enjoys hiking, reading, and volunteering with their church.