Melvio Impact Platform

Social exclusion is a critical global challenge across societies. Approximately 32 percent of the world's population faces risk of social exclusion. Social exclusion can refer to exclusion from education or training, working life, or other central structures in society. Social exclusion is often caused by factors such as socio-economic status, ethnicity, gender, or other minority positions. Those experiencing social exclusion often find themselves in vulnerable positions across various aspects of life, with limited access to essential services or participation.

It is widely recognised that education, community engagement, and extracurricular activities and education play pivotal roles in enhancing social well-being, skill development and fostering social cohesion. However, not all individuals have equitable access to schooling, community resources, recreational sports, or leisure opportunities. The impact of participation is most profound during childhood, where equal opportunities are essential for fostering inclusive environments.

Our mission is to build inclusive communities for children and youth by empowering various public, private, and non-governmental organizations. We recognise that by enhancing access to educational resources, extracurricular activities, and community engagement opportunities, we can mitigate the effects of social exclusion and promote more equitable learning environments for all.

Melvio is a platform that harnesses data to make a difference in the lives of underprivileged children and youth. Melvio is a SaaS product used by dozens of nonprofits, NGOs and public sector organisations, that want to improve their reach, accessibility, and impact.

Our platform partners with organizations working with children, youth, and their families, helping the organisations collect essential data directly from the beneficiaries. This data isn't just numbers – Melvio’s actionable insights help organizations set objectives and improve the reach and impact of their programs.

Melvio’s technology is developed to work in different digital environments. At its simplest, Melvio is a website for data collection and if needed, the surveys can be integrated to existing CRM platforms and applications to collect standardised data from the community members. The data is visible on a real-time dashboard that merges the subjective data with local demographics to paint a clear picture of accessibility to make sure these programs reach everyone they should. By regularly collecting subjective background and well-being data, we can gauge the real impact activities are having on lives of children and youth in a local or regional setting.

The data from Melvio is standardized and comparable also across similar organizations. Thus, the data collected can provide valuable insights to both organizations themselves, as well as to their funders, giving them reliable benchmarks and best and cost-effective practices for success.

By giving organizations the tools they need to improve their reach and impact, we’re building a shared understanding about social inclusion, and giving the organisations concrete tools for improvement and greater impact.

Melvio leverages data to enhance the lives of underprivileged children and youth. It serves organizations that provide services and activities that are aimed at children and youth. Melvio helps the organisations to evaluate the reach, accessibility, engagement and impact of their programs, to create programmes that have a bigger impact on people's lives.

By merging subjective background and well-being data with local demographics, Melvio offers insights into the inclusivity of these organizations, irrespective of participants' backgrounds. Regular collection of well-being data enables ongoing assessment of the activities' influence on children's social well-being and sense of inclusion and belongingness.

This collected data fills in the gaps between public data and data collected directly from the beneficiaries, thus it equips organizations to better enhance their outreach, engagement, and overall impact in areas and for populations that benefit from it the most. Melvio offers actionable insights that can be used to improve programmes to have a bigger impact, thereby fostering positive change in the lives of vulnerable children and youth.

We Foundation (Me-säätiö) is an operational non-profit foundation with a rich history in community engagement. For nearly a decade, we've pioneered local community initiatives in disadvantaged areas across Finland, maintaining an active community team dedicated to serving children, youth, and families. We have also conducted pilot projects in Sweden and India.

Our journey towards developing a data and impact tool stems directly from recognizing the needs of our own community work, and those of our various partners. Motivated by a desire to better understand the reach and effectiveness of our activities, we started a data collection and tool development initiative that eventually turned into our impact technology Melvio. This endeavor has been integral to our daily operations, with our own technology serving as the backbone of our community efforts. The tool is now in use across Finland, utilised by cities, local communities, public sector entities, sports clubs and federations, as well as funders.

We're combining the strengths of a community-based organization with those of a dedicated technology team. Our collaborative approach involves working hand-in-hand with our communities and partners, ensuring that the technology we develop is not only functional but also deeply aligned with the needs and aspirations of those we serve.

The Melvio platform – in its early stages – has already made significant strides in empowering almost 100 organizations or communities, impacting over 50,000 individuals in Finland. Our partner organizations have harnessed Melvio insights to drive their operations towards greater inclusivity, accessibility, and enhanced impact of their activities. What began as a tool utilized by communities, nonprofits, and NGOs has now expanded its reach to encompass funders such as city organizations.

We are currently preparing for a large pilot project with several Finnish municipalities that will enable us to find out how actionable data can help to create more equitable extracurricular activities for vulnerable children. The learnings from this project can then be shared with municipalities outside of Finland.

While our platform has primarily been utilized in Finland, we've also conducted successful pilots in two additional countries. Looking ahead, our focus is on scaling the platform to new communities beyond Finland, ensuring that even more organizations and individuals worldwide can benefit from shared metrics of measuring social inclusion and actionable insights from other partners.

We started developing our solution in a local context, but see huge global potential. We’d love to find partners and network to work with us in scaling the solution globally; to recognize the product-market fit, go-to-market strategy and technology development needs in different markets.

Melvio is the first data platform for organisations operating in the social inclusion space, providing the organisations with standardised and comparable metrics on their performance.

Melvio indicators are based on extensive research and the data is collected directly from the participants, and it combines the subjective data with public demographics.

Data can be used as a tool to spotlight a problem and start solving it. Melvio data can be used to understand the baseline and for setting objectives: once the organizations gain more information about who they reach and how their activities affect their participants, they will be able to improve the impact of their activities. Through Melvio, organisations receive comparison and insights from other similar organizations.

We continuously follow the number of individuals we reach through our platform. Impact data is all in all for us, and we track what share of individuals supply information about their family background or well-being, and its changes. Through our data, we wish to validate a change in as many individuals' lives as possible: we track the change in people's social well-being and in school motivation, for example.

On systems change level, we wish to affect our partner organisations: the more partner organisations use our data platform, the more individuals we affect. We wish to introduce inclusive policies and practices among our partner organisations.

Melvio impact platform consists of several applications for data collection and data insights. It includes a tablet application for participant tracking, member profile website, staff application, and admin panel for dashboards and insights. Melvio is an independent system for data collection and insights, and it can be integrated to other external systems (such as CRMs) to utilise existing member information.

Eight people currently work for the Melvio team full-time.

We started building Melvio four years ago - the first versions of Melvio applications were launched in 2020.

We Foundation currently has in total 15 employees that come from socially and culturally diverse backgrounds. Diversity, equity, and inclusion are at the core of our mission - we are committed to building an inclusive workplace that will adjust, learn, and grow as needed.

We have actively raised awareness of diversity and inclusion in our team. Since we work with the local communities, it is essential for our team to represent the groups we work with, and this is emphasized in our recruitment policies. We have introduced various policies and practices to foster inclusion within our everyday working life: flexibility during work days, inclusive holidays, and two working languages, for example.

We provide our platform to other nonprofit organizations, NGOs, and public sector organizations, such as cities and municipalities, that are willing to measure their impact.

We operate on a nonprofit basis, but our platform has a symbolic licence fee that is used to cover parts of the development costs.

Majority of organisations using the Melvio platform are already paying customers, and by scaling the product to 5 000 - 10 000 annual user organisations, most of the development costs can be covered.