Think Native: Leveraging Technology for Human Flourishing

Imagine you just received a life-changing medical diagnosis. You stumble out of the doctor’s office thinking, “What do I do? How will I get through this?” Then imagine immediately finding yourself connected with someone who walked through the exact same journey. That’s just one kind of powerful connection the peer support platform Think Native facilitates daily.

Think Native is a Community Engagement Platform that smart-matches trained peer supporters, mentors and champions to those looking for care, resources and support in their journey. The platform helps hospitals, patient care programs, nonprofits, churches, educational establishments and other great organizations facilitate meaningful relationships and measure personal growth and transformation among the people they affect.

Lance Villio, Think Native Founder and CEO, created the platform after his years in the nonprofit sector fostered a desire to leverage technology to catalyze human flourishing. Prior to Think Native, Villio served as the president of I Am Second and the executive director of Q Ideas. We asked him to share the Think Native story with us.

“How do you know that you are winning?”

“One of my mentors, Peb Jackson, raised this question early in my career and it used to haunt me as a nonprofit guy. I knew I wasn’t using the same metrics that were the standard practice for profit-making businesses — things like ROI, sales growth and KPI’s. Ultimately, it was this penetrating question that set me on a mission to create a SaaS platform that we call Think Native.

I soon learned that before I could answer the question of ‘winning,’ we would have to determine how we were going to keep score — in other words, how were we going to measure our success?

In the nonprofit space, we’re often making possible a fascinating and truly significant intangible known as life transformation. So how can we possibly measure people experiencing this kind of growth and development?

While exploring this critical issue, I was introduced to Jack Nicholson, a doctoral-level mentor, coach and consultant. He’s a life-long learner who has been researching the principles and processes of human development for nearly 40 years now! Jack explained:

‘Human transformation can only happen as a result of a relationship of trust, and I’ve got the research in Interpersonal Neurobiology to prove it.’

It was right about that time that I asked Jack to join me as a co-founder of Think Native.

Why did we create the Think Native technology platform, you might ask? The background for our company name is found in the Book of Acts. It was my wife Hannah who shared with me this interesting fact:

‘Did you know when the Holy Spirit came to earth to commune with people, the Spirit never made them learn some new ‘god-language?’ The Spirit spoke to everyone in their native tongue.’

Do you see where I’m going with this? Statistically, there are more mobile phones in the world than people, and social research shows the average American spends up to 9 hours a day on their technology platforms and devices. Technology is not foreign to them.

It is their native language.

At Think Native, we leverage the common language of technology to develop relationships of trust in a way that is measurable and scalable.

There are any number of terms for these groups—from peer support, to mentoring initiatives, discipleship communities or even sponsorship programs. For these organizations to succeed, each of them must develop relationships of trust.  Each relationship of trust will typically have an individual with some level of experience. Think Native calls that person a Champion. A person seeking guidance or support we call a Community Member. The way we measure success is not by the total number of mentees, members or disciples. We count our success when we develop relationships where the Community Members grow and then eventually become Champions themselves. This organic multiplication of relationships is the key to any great movement.  

A good example is our client, Susan G. Komen (Oklahoma). The Champion, a survivor of breast cancer, is smart-matched and connected with a newly diagnosed patient, who is a Community Member. Once the survivor’s treatment has been successfully completed, the Community Member develops into a Champion to guide and support another recently diagnosed person, and so the relationship of trust is now replicated.  

This Champion / Community Member relationship exists in organizations, associations, and businesses throughout various industries and it makes up our primary and secondary target markets. Think Native is diligent about helping great organizations accomplish their mission through leveraging the power of human-driven design. We help them scale and keep score, so decision-makers know when they are making a significant impact. 

that’s how we know we’re winning.