We are thrilled to welcome Eric Magnuson to the Groundwire team. Eric is our new (and first!) Labs Manager. At the end of last year, we put an official name to our innovation program and Groundwire Labs was born.

What makes our Labs program so unique is the process through which we drive innovation – we draw from the experience of our strategy, web development, and database consulting teams, our partners in nonprofit technology and online organizing, and from our real world clients who are putting our technology to work day in and day out solving the climate crisis, advocating for environmental justice and sustainable communities, working for the health of the public, and protecting our wild lands, water, and wildlife.

Eric comes to Groundwire having spent the last 14 years developing web technologies and the last ten directly serving the needs of nonprofits online. He founded and was the managing director of Web Collective, an eight-person web consulting company focused on organizations with a sustainability mission.

“I'm coming with experience building a non-hierarchical, highly-collaborative collective of designers and programmers into a high-functioning for-profit business. That experience seems useful in the context of the Labs Manager's role in working with the broader developer community to create innovation,” says Eric.

As the manager of Groundwire Labs, Eric will have the opportunity to engage both technology developers and Groundwire's clients to influence the direction we want to go in nonprofit technology.

“I most look forward to generating innovative tools that fundamentally change how these organizations function. We're only just beginning to understand what is possible with all of these new information technologies now at our disposal. It's an open frontier for us to explore and figure out how to leverage for the benefit of the organizations we support,” he says.

A North Carolina native, Eric moved here in the early 90s to be close to the music, the technology, and the natural wonders of the Great Northwest. He holds an MBA in Sustainable Business from the Bainbridge Graduate Institute and is excited to apply multiple bottom-line thinking to how Groundwire Labs measure products' success.

Outside of work he and his wife, Sarah, are busy caring for their baby girl, large dog, three cats and horse, and when time allows, volunteering for local groups who build community and encourage more sustainable ways of living.