Anjali Ramachandran, co-founder of Ada’s List, found Mobilize on her journey to connect women in London’s tech industry. What started as a local group of 20 women has turned into a business networking group of 3,900 women. Today, these women meet on a monthly basis, host professional networking events and have developed lifelong friendships.
Ada’s List Fundraiser 2016 from Karoline K on Vimeo.
MEET ADA’S LIST
In 2013, Anjali and three friends started a monthly meetup to connect women in technology and create a space for professional development and networking.
“The goal of Ada’s List is to create an inclusive and equitable empowered community of women working in technology towards a more balanced technology industry,” she explains.
At first, the network consisted of 20 women Anjali and her co-founders knew, but slowly members started to invite friends and friends of friends.
“It just snowballed. It just kept growing and growing and growing,” Anjali explains.
THE CHALLENGE
When the group began to grow, Anjali managed communications and events on Google Groups, manually adding new members to the group. Once Ada’s List reached 1,000 women, managing the business networking group using Google Groups became very difficult—especially since it expanded outside of the United Kingdom area.
“We started off as a UK-focused group, but we became global because we didn’t want to restrict any woman, from anywhere in the world, from getting the benefits of being a part of the community,” Anjali says.
Global expansion created an urgent need for Ada’s List to have a more sophisticated organizational system with subgroups. They also needed to streamline communication threads and have a more efficient and scalable way to add new members.
In addition to managing the workflow of the community, it was difficult for members to have meaningful conversations about future events and sharing business networking opportunities.
“Our goal is to create positive change,” she explains. “Amongst all the emails that were coming in, there were some really good conversations, but they were just getting lost in the deluge of being mail, in the deluge of when topics that were being discussed.”
THEN THEY FOUND MOBILIZE
At the end of 2015, with over 1,000 members, Anjali and her co-founders began to test hosting the community on Mobilize.
“When we looked at all the other options, Mobilize was the best fit,” she says. The ability to create subgroups helped Ada’s List create small city-wide chapters as they continued to expand.
“People who are in London don’t have to hear about stuff that’s going on in the other part of the world if they’re not interested,” she says. “ If they are, they can always opt in. If they’re not, they don’t need to be getting these hundreds of emails all the time. That’s really good.”
The dashboard and ability to easily add new members instantly put management issues to rest.
“The dashboard really simplified our lives. It’s also easier for us to verify who people are. Between the subgroups, being able to streamline conversations to the groups and the admin features, those are the biggest things for us that I really love,” she says.
RESULTS & IMPACT
Since using Mobilize, Ada’s List has grown into a thriving global women’s professional networking group—scaling from 1,000 members to 4,000. Every month, Anjali says, they typically add another 100 members.
Those part of the Ada’s List community are attending tech conferences together, and helping each other advance in their careers.
“There’s an average of 10 jobs posted every day. Sometimes 15, but at least, that usually is 10 jobs posted a day,” she says.
Mobilize, Anjali says, has also helped Ada’s List become a true professional network.
“Mobilize has enabled Ada’s List to look, feel and act more professional. It’s easy to use, but it doesn’t have any of the features that make you feel like you are a part of this massive community,” she says.