Every project is a puzzle, the pieces for which are the relationships, skills, knowledge, materials, and other assets that must be assembled for success. Assetmap is a platform that helps you and your groups discover and coordinate these resources.

Our venture's underlying methodology is derived from asset-based community development (ABCD), an approach designed more than forty years ago by organizers and academics trying to fight urban poverty. By shifting the focus from "needs" to "assets" and helping communities better coordinate their existing resources, they were able to transform neighborhoods around the world.

Their core assumption was that all people — even the poorest of the poor — have something to contribute, but that it took asking the right questions to unlock those assets.

As founders of the Center for Global Engagement at Northwestern, we taught student social entrepreneurs the ABCD approach to leveraging their resources for good. At the same time, though, we noticed that the process of taking inventory of nonfinancial assets - access to classrooms for workshops, relationships with key faculty members, particular knowledge about the countries to which we were sending students - closely mirrored the ABCD approach.

Unfortunately, the lack of quality tools for taking account of and better leveraging the resources of our volunteers and supports made it a constant struggle to find what we needed. Simply put, it was too difficult for us to let our friends know what we needed, and for us to keep track of what they had to offer.

The Assetmap platform will solve that problem for groups of all types, whether it is members of a conference community discovering new contacts with complementary projects, members of a team harnessing the knowledge and experience of colleagues in a different division, or a community development organization trying to find meeting spaces.