Impact organizations operate in diverse and often challenging contexts. Their work generates valuable lessons, but too often these insights remain siloed within projects or disappear once a program ends. Propel’s mission is to give organizations a simple yet powerful way to capture and build upon their learnings, creating a foundation for smarter, more adaptive work.

We designed Propel as a learning framework centered on learning stories: short, structured narratives that capture the key steps, outcomes, and lessons from real projects. This format turns tacit knowledge into explicit insights that can be easily shared and applied across teams. Alongside this, we created tools for organizing and connecting stories, enabling users to see patterns, identify evidence, and scale proven approaches. The design process combined research, prototyping, and iterative testing with impact organizations to ensure the product fit seamlessly into their workflows.

Knowledge in large organizations is hard to manage. Insights are stored in scattered documents, difficult to retrieve, and rarely applied to new contexts. The challenge was to design a platform that could systematize learning without overwhelming teams-balancing structure with flexibility so knowledge flows naturally and remains usable in the field.

Propel enables organizations to transform fragmented project insights into a living knowledge base. By capturing lessons systematically and making them searchable and reusable, teams can adapt faster, avoid repeating mistakes, and base their decisions on real-world evidence. The result is a collective intelligence that helps impact organizations stay relevant, resilient, and more effective in achieving their mission.