The Future of Deedmob: Do Good Great

Dear Deedmob friends,

Today is a big day of change at Deedmob. I am sharing exciting news about our company’s future and a major leadership transition. 

‍Flashback

Over five years ago, a new idea to strengthen our local communities via technology was born at the University of Oxford. This idea was called Deedmob: Mobilising people to do great Deeds. Our mission was an idealistic one; strengthening local communities and making them more resilient. How? Via an innovative platform that would match, organise, and coordinate volunteers more effectively and measure community impact more accurately. We started developing this platform by trial and error with incredible early partners such as VC Utrecht, Vrijwilligerscentrale Nijmegen, Actief Roermond, and countless other organisations. As Deedmob, we also wanted to show that technology startups could be a significant force for good, while creating an ethical, sustainable business model and making revenue the right way. 

‍This idea has now become a reality‍

• Over 15,000 organisations have adopted Deedmob’s volunteering platform tool - towns, charities, foundations, and companies worldwide, covering over 5 million citizens.
• Impactful matches are being made every 90 seconds around the globe. 
• Deedmob is expanding internationally and is now active in The Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Europe, Southeast Asia, and the United States. 
• Our technology and team have received much positive attention, including from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the international Forbes 30-under-30 list, featuring us together with Greta Thunberg in 2020. 
• Deedmob has become one of Europe's largest and leading social-tech companies. In fact, Deedmob's impact has been so significant that it has inspired other companies, charities, organisations and startups to launch similar platform concepts worldwide - a great sign that positive change is happening in our communities.

These are all great company highlights, but most importantly, our technology has actually helped our partners make more impact. Some examples I want to shed light on include the following:

• The charity 10,000Hours: four years ago, this charity had a small group of volunteers. Now, they have grown tremendously to become a robust organisation. They train and mobilise thousands of young adults to make an impact in their local communities via their program called Music Moves. Music Moves has grown to become the leading MDT program in The Netherlands, fostering entrepreneurial skills in the music sector amongst young adults.
• CoronaHelpers: an initiative we set up with our local partners to mobilise close to 30,000 volunteers (both medical and non-medical) to help out citizens to cope with the early covid pandemic crises. We offered free use of Deedmob technology to mobilise volunteers and cope with these crises. CoronaHelpers, thereby, became the largest Covid-19 volunteering initiative in Europe, being active in over 4 countries, strengthening the resilience of the local communities.
• Floods in the South of The Netherlands: we helped mobilise and organise volunteers to help people severely affected by floods in 2021. Within 24 hours, we successfully pivoted the Provincial Deedmob platform of Limburg into a disaster relief platform and reached over 800 volunteers to help those affected.
• Other great organisational examples include VC Utrecht, The Order of Malta, Oma’s Soep, Giro555, Spark Somerset, PEP The Hague, and Hertfordshire; the list continues etc. 

‍Now, Deedmob has arrived at a new phase, from startup to scale-up, our mission continues

Our mission has not yet been completed. Local communities across the globe are facing more and more pressures. Our society is becoming older, lonelier, and poorer while environmental pressures are increasing, and people feel increasingly lacking purpose. Our society needs you, and you need our society. This is a transformational time for our local communities. We will need to depend more on each other than solely on ourselves. We can only get there if we work together.

Our communities’ challenges are urgent and will become more complex as time goes by. I believe it is Deedmob’s responsibility to help continue finding solutions to these challenges. These are societal challenges I deeply care about. A lot of great work is already being done by our current SaaS Deedmob platform tool, our team, our partners, and our volunteers, and we shall continue to do so. But despite all these great efforts, our society's challenges continue to grow daily. Therefore, I want to take more time to think of new additional ways in which Deedmob’s technology can help our ailing societies to become stronger, better, more equal and hopeful. For that reason, I have decided to resign from my day-to-day role as CEO of Deedmob in order to devote more time to solving these societal challenges with more distance from our current daily operations. Simultaneously, this has created the opportunity to boost our day-to-day leadership team, continuing and improving all the great work already being done together with our partners with a new CEO and CTO. 

‍Welcome Levi and Tadeáš: the new Deedmob CEO & CTO! 

It is with great pleasure that I can announce to you today an exciting new leadership transition at Deedmob. We appoint Levi Witbaard as our new CEO and Tadeáš Peták as CTO. Levi and Tadeáš will lead Deedmob by bringing tremendous experience, new insights and expertise to their roles and are well-suited to lead Deedmob in its next phase of growth and impact. Levi and Tadeáš are warm, kind, ambitious, and 110% committed to Deedmob’s mission: helping our partners grow and make more impact. 

Both Levi and Tadeáš are more than qualified and motivated to take Deedmob to the next level. Until now, Levi has been our Head of Growth for the past year. In this role, he quickly demonstrated his ability to think strategically, structured, and he has a strong determination to transform ideas into reality; beyond his original scope of work. Tadeáš, being one of our Senior Engineers, captured our entire team’s minds and hearts with his skilful insights into the codebase, his friendly compassion towards his other colleagues, and his inspirational leadership skills. For both David and me, it was a logical next step for Levi and Tadeáš to lead Deedmob into the next phase. This phase will focus on growing Deedmob domestically and internationally while increasing our impact. Levi and Tadeáš form a strong team with complementary skillsets, from which our partners, team members and stakeholders will significantly benefit. 

I am grateful to have worked with them for over a year while preparing for this leadership transition. I have learned a lot from both gentlemen in this process. Levi and Tadeáš have brought excellent new ideas, energy and creativity to Deedmob. I am very excited about the next phase of Deedmob under their new day-to-day leadership and will support them in our shared mission to grow Deedmob and make it even more impactful. I will do this by serving as the Founder, Chairman of Deedmob. Adjacent to all the great work already being done by the Deedmob team and her partners, I will devote more time to thinking and developing new innovative solutions and partnerships to help solve our growing community’s challenges.

[Read more in Deedmob's official statement]

‍Thank you and let’s go

At this time, I also want to express how incredibly grateful I am for my Co-Founder, CTO David Furlong, founding team members Hendrik-Jan Overmeer and Tycho Onnasch, and our longest team member Gerbrand Holland. They all believed in Deedmob's original idea and helped bring it to where it is today. Also, I want to express gratitude to our current and former team members, volunteers, partners, journalists, investors, and even competitors who keep us sharp. 

This is an exciting time for Deedmob and our partners. I am confident that our company, its mission and community commitment are in great day-to-day hands with Levi, Tadeáš and the rest of the team. I am convinced that together in this new internal organisational team structure, we can bring Deedmob to a new level, helping our current partners better, welcoming more partners and thereby helping to build more resilient communities. 

This Deedmob transformation will enable us to work towards the future in an even better, coordinated way that is built upon passion and commitment from everyone involved. Our Deedmob mission is not over. We just got started. Our original slogan said at the time, ‘Do Good Better’. It is now time to make it together even Greater. Let’s go!

Warm regards,

Boudewijn Wijnands