Stay Informed!

By Sean Luechtefeld on 06/21/2010 @ 01:11 PM

Tags: Innovation

About a month ago, I posted with some preliminary numbers regarding our 2010 application process. I shared with you then the statistics regarding where our applicants were coming from, what areas within which they were working and the stages of development of their ideas. This information was exciting for us – it showed a diverse range of ideas from a variety of creative thinkers.

As promised, I want to share a bit more information with you as we get ready to unveil our newest Innovative Idea Champions and our new Innovator-in-Residence (check your email and our Website on July 7 for that big announcement). As we began gauging our outreach efforts for this application cycle, one of the indicators we were most interested in was “new to CFED” – in other words, is the applicant someone we’ve already done work with, or are they someone with which we are unfamiliar? Ultimately, we wanted to make sure a decent chuck of our applicants were people “unknown” to CFED, since such information would show that we did an effective job reaching out to new populations. As an initial goal, we hoped that at least 30% of our applicants would be new to CFED.

As it turns out, we did a way better job than we could have hoped for! Rather than having 30% of our applicant pool be individuals we hadn’t previously worked with, only 30% of the applicants were people we had previously worked with! While we love our friends and partners and were eager to learn about their innovative approaches to expanding economic opportunity, we were even more excited to expand our reach and bring into our circle a group of forward-thinking, fresh minds. The graph above shows that we did exactly that. About 31% of the applicants were people with whom we had previously worked. The others – nearly 75 in all – are people we are eager to begin working with.

While we did a great job reaching out to new communities of innovators, we could not have expanded our reach nearly as well without YOUR help! You, the loyal innovation@cfed community member, helped publicize the application and promote our platform. You forwarded emails, made phone calls and recommended your friends and colleagues. You were an integral part of this process, whether or not you applied, and for that we are incredibly thankful!

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