DigitalC, previously known as OneCleveland, and later OneCommunity, had a track record of delivering high-speed internet to Northeast Ohio. In 2012, the group had connected to the internet 2,300 schools, libraries, hospitals, etc.
OneCommunity managed a $100 million project to expand Northeast Ohio’s broadband network. And in 2015, the nonprofit installed what was then the “nation’s fastest commercial internet service” to Cleveland’s Health-Tech Corridor.
So when the nonprofit, which rebranded as DigitalC in 2015, set a goal for connecting 40,000 predominantly low-income families with high-speed internet by 2024, the future seemed inevitable.
But today, despite tens of millions in private donations, lower prices than many commercial internet providers and a firehose of public money through the American Rescue Plan Act earmarked for broadband expansion, DigitalC’s grand ambitions have slowed to a crawl.
The group bid – a proposal unlikely to be accepted — on a $19.4 million American Rescue Plan Act-funded project to provide broadband to 25,000 homes in Cuyahoga County. That means the agency’s timeline to meet its goal of serving 40,000 households by 2025 is likely to get pushed back, spokeswoman Susan Valerian told cleveland.com.
The nonprofit, which connected roughly 400 Cleveland households in 2020, saw a relatively large jump in customers in 2021, reaching, 1,160 households that year, according to media reports. However, in the first five months of 2022, DigitalC’s customer count increased only by double digits, serving roughly 1,200 households, Valerian said.
A goal to bring broadband to 200 homes in Cleveland’s Central neighborhood in April was delayed because of a broken fiber optic cable that had to be rerun, Valerian said.
As DigitalC has struggled to recruit customers, even just a few miles from their Euclid headquarters, a competitor has moved in, offering more expensive, but far faster service. In December, Spectrum purchased WindSpeed Broadband, formerly known as East Cleveland Cable. In May, Spectrum announced it would bring internet speeds four to 12 times faster than DigitalC’s guaranteed speed to East Cleveland.
In a press release announcing new Spectrum service, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine and East Cleveland Mayor Brandon King lauded the development.
“I’ve worked with East Cleveland Mayor King for several years to ensure his community has 100% access. Charter’s announcement is another step toward that goal and a win for residents of East Cleveland,” DeWine said in the release.
Meanwhile, in recent months, DigitalC has been managing a CEO transition, a miscalculation of government bureaucracy, COVID-19, supply chain issues and increased competition, Valerian said.
“So obviously with the pandemic — which turned a lot of things upside down — it’s created a lot more challenges that we didn’t anticipate,” Valerian said. “So, it’s definitely slowed us down, and I think it’s slowed everyone down.”
However, DigitalC’s customer base did grow between 2020 and 2021 – as the pandemic was in full swing. As the pandemic faded in 2022, customer growth slowed.
Leadership
Dorothy Baunach and Lev Gonick, who came to Cleveland in 2001 to be the chief information officer for Case Western Reserve University, co-founded DigitalC, which was originally known as OneCleveland and eventually OneCommunity. OneCommunity still exists as a fundraising source for DigitalC.
Both groups shared the goal of connecting to broadband Cleveland, which ranked the worst-connected large city in America in 2019, according to a digital equity group. In an ABC News interview during the COVID-19 pandemic, Baunach described equitable internet access as a “civil rights and human rights issue.”
DigitalC’s plan to expand broadband does not include digging trenches and laying fiber-optic cables used for traditional broadband, Valerian said. Rather, the company uses a mix of technologies to provide wireless, broadband access to parts of town not served by traditional broadband services.
The broadband expansion has promised to be the most transformative part of the nonprofit’s work, but the group also helps people, particularly elderly internet users, learn how to use the internet.
Baunach, a founder of the organization and former CEO, stepped down earlier this year, taking a position as a “strategic advisor,” according to a March news release.
The press release didn’t give a reason for her resignation, but Valerian said Baunach became a strategic advisor so she could focus on “innovation and strategy” while the next CEO can focus on scaling up the nonprofit.
DigitalC is now being led by Sharon Sobol Jordan, the nonprofit’s interim CEO, according to the group’s website.
Jordan, the former chief of staff for Cuyahoga County Executive Armond Budish, has a long history of leading nonprofits, one of which was in the tech industry.
From 2006 to 2014, Jordan led Centers for Families and Children, a Cleveland nonprofit several times the size of DigitalC. In 2018, she left the Budish administration to lead nonprofit Unify Project, which later rebranded as Unify Labs. Unify Labs touts itself as “a nonprofit tech innovation center,” that had previously said its mission was to use big data to reduce poverty, according to its website and tax filings.
In previous years, it was unclear what work Unify would be doing. Today, however, Unify’s website features one project — the creation of an app, FlashHired!, that aims to make hiring employees easier and more equitable, according to the website.
The app has been available for more than a year in both the Apple App store and the Google Play store. However, it has relatively little usage, especially when compared to job-search giants such as Indeed, Glassdoor, Monster and Ziprecruiter – all of which have millions of downloads, according to the Google Play store. As of May 9, FlashHired has been downloaded more than 100 times.
Cuyahoga County
In 2021, DigitalC was one of nine companies to submit a bid on a $19.4 million ARPA-funded project to add or improve broadband to 20 Cuyahoga County neighborhoods over the course of three years.
DigitalC’s bid for the Cuyahoga County project focused heavily on Cleveland.
“Our main focus has always been the city of Cleveland. So that’s what we honed in on. Obviously, there’s a need in East Cleveland as well,” Valerian said.
DigitalC’s focus on Cleveland and East Cleveland hurt the nonprofit’s chances when Cuyahoga County was scoring potential vendors, documents show.
Potential vendors, which included internet giants such as AT&T, Spectrum and Wireless were evaluated on several categories and given a composite score out of 100. The categories included proposed solution, scope of work, marketing and community outreach, business model, service area, project management, qualifications, pricing and other categories.
Of the six finalists for the bid, DigitalC scored the second highest overall, but the lowest out of the six in the “service area” category, according to county documents.
However, even if DigitalC had expanded the scope of its bid and earned the maximum 10 points in the “service area” category, the nonprofit would have still finished behind PCs for People. DigitalC, which earned a 4.6 in “service area” finished with an overall score of 70.6. PCs for People, which met or exceeded DigitalC’s score in every category, finished with a score of 84.5, according to county documents.
Asked why DigitalC focused its Cuyahoga County bid on only part of the county, Valerian said: “From a strategic standpoint, we didn’t think the county would be ready to allocate funds to connect the entire city before the City of Cleveland did. East Cleveland was a city in need too, so we chose to seek funds for that community.”
However, the opposite happened.
While both Cuyahoga County and the City of Cleveland moved to allocate roughly $20 million each in ARPA funding for broadband expansion in mid-2021, the city’s plan included almost no details and was fraught with allegations of “political grandstanding.”
The city has yet to issue a request for proposals for its ARPA-funded broadband project.
“We really emphasize, this is a partnership. No one can do it alone,” Valerian said. “We’re looking at all avenues right now.”
Public Interest
The success or failure of DigitalC is more than a question of Cleveland’s digital future, it’s also a taxpayer and public interest issue. Of DigitalC’s $2.49 million in total support, 91% of that comes from public support, according to its 2019 IRS tax forms, the most recent available.
While DigitalC almost certainly won’t get the Cuyahoga County contract, the nonprofit will “absolutely” continue to seek public funds, especially ARPA dollars, Valerian said.
“There’s a lot of money out there, so that’s the good news,” Valerian said of ARPA funding. “The challenging news is that with a lot of money out there, many more people are raising their hands to do this.”
DigitalC received $20 million in grants from the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Supporting Foundation and David and Inez Myers Foundation in summer 2021, and that money is being used to scale up the nonprofit so it can expand its capacity long-term, according to Valerian and a news release following the grant announcement.
However, the nonprofit is still waiting on more money before it executes its plan to expand network capacity to 40,000 customers in the next two years, Valerian said. After that, it will take even longer to get customers to sign up.
“We still feel confident we can do an 18-24-month build plan. It’s contingent on the dollars, and we’re really hoping these public partners will come in quickly so we can get going on this,” Valerian said.
Wifi woes
Former Cleveland City Council President Kevin Kelley said DigitalC’s plans to plug Cleveland into the 21st century was “promising” but also had flaws. However, there weren’t many alternatives, and many thought DigitalC’s plan to rectify Cleveland’s status as the worst-connected large city in America was worth a try, Kelley said.
“I think that people were so hungry for anything that (when) they put forward that grand-slam proposal, it’s like, ‘hey, who wouldn’t like it?’” Kelley said of DigitalC. “But if you’ve been really spending a lot of time on this issue, you know there’s some limitations with it.”
While Kelley said he still sees DigitalC as “part of the solution” to Cleveland’s relatively low connectivity, the only feasible way to connect the entire city is to either partner with major internet companies or to have the public own the internet like in Chattanooga, Tennessee, he said.
Current Cleveland City Council President Blaine Griffin said he remains bullish on DigitalC.
“I think they have a good model that is helpful to areas that have traditionally been left behind and are not adequately served by broadband and fiber optics. So, I still think there’s room for growth,” Griffin said.
Griffin met with DigitalC last week and said the nonprofit is currently trying to gain access to tall buildings and radio towers so it can install technology needed to provide wireless broadband access to more customers.
In the Fairfax neighborhood, which is in Griffin’s ward, DigitalC had plans to offer internet to residents by mid-2021, according to media reports.
Asked how the project is going, Griffin said: “It’s been going okay, but they have a couple of infrastructure things we both need to figure out — getting access to some of the higher buildings in the area and light poles and other things.”
“I know that there have been some stops and starts because of COVID and other things,” Griffin said when asked about the lower-than projected number of DigitalC customers. “But I will tell you that they’ve had a tremendous amount of outreach, they’ve gone door to door, they have met in public parks, they have gone everywhere to try to meet people where they’re at. So if they don’t have high numbers, it definitely isn’t because of lack of effort.”
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