Effective Leadership Academy is a mission-driven organization dedicated to developing the next generation of leaders. As ELA’s programs expanded, so did the complexity of their internal operations. The team had made significant progress building out boards and workflows within Monday.com, but rapid growth introduced a new set of problems: duplicate records were proliferating across boards, interconnected processes between departments weren’t automated, and staff were spending increasing amounts of time on manual data management instead of delivering ELA’s core programs.
These weren’t surface-level annoyances—they were structural issues that threatened operational efficiency. Prospecting and lead tracking, community relations, advancement, foundation management, and contact records all lived in separate boards with no reliable way to stay synchronized. ELA needed a partner who could untangle the complexity, design scalable workflows, and give their team the tools and training to maintain it all going forward.
This was Novel Minds’ second engagement with ELA, building on the strong foundation established during the initial Monday.com implementation. That prior relationship gave us deep familiarity with ELA’s infrastructure, team dynamics, and organizational goals—context that allowed us to move quickly and with precision. We began with a structured research and strategy phase: reviewing existing workflows, identifying key stakeholders and their reporting needs, mapping out the current state of every operational board, and gathering requirements for how the system should work.
From that analysis, we crafted a detailed development strategy that outlined exactly which boards, connections, integrations, and automations needed to be built—along with an implementation and training curriculum to ensure ELA’s team could own the system independently after handoff.
Novel Minds designed and implemented a comprehensive overhaul of ELA’s Monday.com environment. At the core was a master contact list with a built-in duplication management process that both cleaned existing records and prevented new duplicates from being created. We then configured custom workflows across the Prospecting/Leads, Community Relations, Advancement, Foundations, and Contacts boards—tailoring columns, apps, and board structures to match how ELA’s team actually works.
Automated processes, triggers, and board connections replaced the manual work that had been slowing teams down. We addressed specific pain points like missing notifications, notes failing to carry through automations, and data parsing issues that had been causing errors across boards. Every automation was tested against real data and validated with key stakeholders before going live.
To ensure lasting impact, we conducted training sessions for ELA’s team and produced documentation including user guides, FAQs, and best practices. The engagement also included three months of additional support after the initial build, giving ELA a safety net as the team transitioned to self-management.
ELA’s Monday.com environment went from a collection of disconnected boards with growing data integrity issues to a streamlined, automated operational hub. Duplicate records were eliminated and prevented from recurring. Cross-departmental workflows that previously required manual coordination now run automatically, reducing overhead and freeing staff to focus on program delivery. The training and documentation gave ELA’s team the confidence and knowledge to maintain and extend the system on their own.
The five-month engagement—from initial research through extended support—was completed on the planned timeline, with each milestone delivered through the same agile sprint methodology Novel Minds applies to all its projects. ELA gained not just a better platform, but a scalable operational foundation aligned with their mission and ready to grow with them.
This project succeeded because of continuity and trust. As a returning partner, Novel Minds already understood ELA’s infrastructure and goals, which meant less ramp-up time and more targeted solutions. We treated this as an operations engagement, not just a software configuration—taking the time to understand how people actually worked before designing how the system should support them. And by building training and documentation into the scope from the start, we ensured that ELA walked away with ownership, not dependency.
