Accenture has helped The Demand Institute, a nonprofit run jointly by The Conference Board and Nielsen, develop a global data collaboration platform, called Project 8. It serves as a marketplace for information and ideas aimed at better predicting and planning for future human needs such as food, water, and energy as populations continue to grow and become more urban.
Created as a private and public sector collaboration with support from the UN Foundation and designed to support all 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, Project 8 was built on Salesforce Community Cloud, and powered by Einstein Analytics. The platform provides an online community for global organizations to work together on human needs modelling. It provides an intuitive interface that helps enable participants to ask experts questions, discuss findings, access visualization tools, and collaborate on important topics from food security, to the future of agriculture.
Project 8 supports more than 100 organizations across 16 countries. It houses more than 300 million rows of data and is growing daily. Since the program launched, it has seen an 85 percent increase in experts using the platform, and an 80 percent increase in datasets uploaded.
“By bringing researchers and data together in a more centralized tool, we’ll be able to make insights more visible, better anticipate future demands, and ultimately do a better job of planning to meet the needs of the world’s 8 billion+ people by 2050,” said Sarah Cummings, manager, The Demand Institute, Nielsen.
In recognition of this innovative work, Accenture has been named a recipient of the Salesforce Partner Innovation Award in the Nonprofit category. The award was presented at Dreamforce 2019.
Saideep Raj, senior managing director of the Accenture Salesforce Business Group, added, “By connecting data from many organizations, Project 8 can close the research and data gap in the global development sector. With Salesforce technology and support from the United Nations Foundation, this work is a great example of how Accenture can leverage our technology and industry experience to turn big data into big outcomes.”
Tyler Prince, executive vice president, Industries & Partners, Salesforce, said, “The work that our Partner Innovation Awards winners do to drive customer success deserves to be celebrated. Companies across every industry are increasingly turning to the cloud and to trusted partners to guide them through their digital transformation journeys.”
