Customer Profile:

In 1981, Elizabeth Glaser was infected with the AIDS virus through a blood transfusion, and unknowingly passed it on to both of her children. Following her daughter Ariel’s death in 1988, Elizabeth joined with her close friends to create a foundation with a critical mission: to bring hope to all children with AIDS (www.pedaids.org). Since then, the Foundation that now bears Elizabeth’s name has grown from a small domestic organization to a worldwide leader in the fight against pediatric AIDS, working with hundreds of staff in 18 countries. The highly successful research, advocacy, and prevention and treatment programs of the Foundation and its partners have resulted in dramatic advances that have virtually eliminated pediatric AIDS in the United States. Now the Foundation is working to apply the lessons learned domestically to the rest of the world—and is moving quickly and collaboratively to end AIDS in children and to create a generation free of HIV.

Customer Challenge:

The Foundation’s rapid growth led to a highly dispersed, diverse workforce located in multiple time zones. The Foundation needed tools to deliver services and enable communication externally and internally in a consistent and efficient manner. The Foundation was also looking to upgrade its IT infrastructure to be able to better support its evolving mission and increased organizational complexity.

MadWolf Solutions:

SharePoint-Based Intranet: MadWolf’s SharePoint solution serves as a unified sharing platform providing better access to information and serving as a central repository of regularly used Foundation documents and institutional knowledge. MadWolf partnered with the Foundation on all aspects of the project, from needs and workflow analysis to design, prototyping, implementation, and staff training. The final product provided for an easy integration of third-party applications and the gradual addition of future features. The next phase of the project will increase the collaborative capabilities of the platform and will provide more effective document management, ownership, and versioning.

Video Archive: The Foundation has accumulated an extensive collection of video tapes which it wanted to preserve and share with its present and future employees, constituents, media, and donors. To accomplish this, the Foundation envisioned a web-based, searchable video archive that would be accessible by all staff from any location, and where clips would be preserved in a digital format. Ultimately, the video archive would put a human face on the Foundation’s mission and create a platform that could convey its message in a modern and powerful format while ensuring a unified, consistent, and succinct delivery. In addition, the archive would be the platform by which the videos would be shared with parties outside the Foundation, allowing the organization to move away from YouTube to a customized portal. MadWolf provided end-to-end management of this project, including needs analysis and application design and implementation. MadWolf also helped select the vendor for digitization and choose the most appropriate compression format for streaming and burning video. Future projects will focus on expanding the Foundation’s growing multimedia presence.

Infrastructure Advisory and Security Audit: MadWolf assessed the performance and overall health of the Foundation’s IT infrastructure and advised on improvements necessary to support the complexity of the Foundation’s expanded structure and sophisticated new tools being used to support its operations. A security audit was also performed emphasizing the unique security aspects of running a highly-dispersed organization operating in countries with limited infrastructure. MadWolf’s next project will be to advise the Foundation on upgrading its corporate wireless infrastructure.

Customer Feedback:

“MadWolf is a group of really smart people. You can throw a problem at them and they will come back with solid answers. Bigger companies do mostly cookie-cutter projects while MadWolf tailors custom solutions that meet customers’ precise needs. They demonstrate innovative ways of looking at our problems, and even if the challenge was new to them they drew on past expertise to solve it quickly and creatively. MadWolf’s personal touch clearly came through as their consultants and designers became a part of our extended IT team. MadWolf was always eager to work with us. We never felt like small fish in their big pond of customers. ”

Director of IT, Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation