Welcome to Ideal State

Our Story

Ideal State was formed out of a love for helping great organizations be even greater.

Back in 2014, co-founders Sara Teitelman and Jeremy Nurse found themselves in a regular after-work conversation, often over a glass of wine, about the best ways to use technology to transform how great organizations achieve even more great things. How important was the actual technology to the end result? The conclusion was, it's not as important as you might think.

Riffing off of their real-time experiences leading complex technology projects at an international NGO (in Sara's case) and the Veteran's Administration (in Jeremy's case), they concluded that there was only one non-negotiable:

You've got to listen and empathize with people from across the organization to understand the nature of the challenge to be overcome, then design solutions with and for the people who will actually use them. 

A simple concept, really. But human-centered design and agile product development were just beginning to gain popularity in mainstream IT circles. Most nonprofit IT practitioners and digital transformation champions hadn't yet gotten the memo. 

Inspired by this insight, Sara and Jeremy set out to create a new kind of IT consulting firm committed to helping nonprofits massively improve the state of their technology by putting people first. From its humble beginnings around an actual kitchen table, Ideal State grew quickly by word-of-mouth and has gone on to support some of the world's leading nonprofits in their digital transformation journey.