Distrito the 3rd biggest online portal in Brazil for innovation and entrepreneurship. It also has the biggest Brazilian start-up database, with over 15k startups mapped so far.
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‍Industry: Startup Accelerator
Headquarter: Porto Alegre, Brazil
Headcount: 140 people
Mission: To uplift startups through a Strong Innovation Ecosystem focused on Community, Venture, and Data Mining
Startups Supported Annually: 250
Challenge
In their early days, Slack was compatible with their needs. However, as Distrito grew, the platform failed to deliver customizations, a crucial requirement for them: “Slack didn’t have that open source and customizable aspect”, said Diego.
Thus, their goal was to strengthen its communication with diverse businesses and activities by using a communication hub with the following features:
- Team collaboration: For efficient communication among employees and 250 startups being mentored by them;
- Omnichannel: In order to automate daily communications and supporting their community;
- Engagement Dashboard: Being able to monitor and receive data about the community’s engagement, determine the ROI (return of investment), best hours for creating posts and talking to members, etc.
- White Label & Customization: A communication platform with a full set of white-label branding features, that were not possible with Slack.
Results
As Distrito migrated to Rocket.Chat, implementing, and customizing the tool was effortless. “Most things can be changed without needing a developer and can be simply understood by only looking at it. That’s been amazing”, said Diego. Thanks to the High Scalability Cluster, a feature included within the Enterprise plan, Distrito is now able to scale their usage of Rocket.Chat with thousands of new members, without compromising their infrastructure capacity. Most importantly: people have been enjoying it as well.
As an ever-growing community, having a holistic security approach was also one of Distrito’s reasons to adopt Rocket.Chat. Crucial resources to data encryption, especially end-to-end encryption for chats, Identity Protection Secure and granular user permissions were a few benefits gained after adopting Rocket.Chat. On top of that, the secure infrastructure provided by the platform allowed Distrito to choose where to host their data: self-management or cloud deployment.
In 6 months, Distrito turned Rocket.Chat into a vast ecosystem that not only facilitated their communication with their startups but also made it possible to build:
- A news aggregator, so users can consume news without leaving Rocket.Chat.
- A virtual organizer to manage their coworking spaces, enabling people to make room reservations, check if their deliveries had arrived, invite guests to visit, etc.
- An entire database with articles and content pieces that can be directly downloaded through Rocket.Chat.
- A mentorship portal that allows people to find qualified mentors to provide advice based on their expertise and industry.
To help boost engagement in their community, Distrito built a strategy around how to use Rocket.Chat and its most important features. It was so successful that a few months later, stakeholders already had a great impression of Rocket.Chat, said Diego.
