Ray LaVoie
Through Buckeye Innovation, Griffith has worked with several local organizations in the New Albany area.
In mid-September, a delegation representing the New Albany Chamber of Commerce headed to Washington, D.C. to meet with lawmakers from Ohio, equipped with a PDF containing an agenda and informational packet.
But when they got there, they found that Brad Griffith, a member of their group, had taken it upon himself to put together an easy-to-use app with all of the relevant information.
“He created an app the night before our trip and then sent the link to everyone,” says Cherie Nelson, executive director of the Chamber.
To those who know him, this kind of ingenuity and desire to help is typical of Griffith, a New Albany resident and president of New Albany-based web and app design company Buckeye Innovation. It’s part of the reason his small company works exclusively with mission-driven organizations.
When he founded the company in 2009, Griffith didn’t want to work with just any organization. He wanted to work with those looking to resolve equality or opportunity gaps – to promote causes that are important to him and people close to him – and use his technological background to further those causes.
“I had to ask (myself), ‘What are the problems I care about solving?’” Griffith says.
Service to the community
Ray LaVoie
Griffith has enjoyed working with Neil Collins at Innovate New Albany since they started the TIGER business program in 2015.
Running his own business suits the 43-year-old Griffith well, he says. It gives him the flexibility to be involved in the community – and, more importantly, his children’s lives and interests. He and his wife, Abbey, have two daughters, ages 11 and 15.
“I told my wife before we got married, ‘Just so you know, I want to be a PTO president dad,’” says Griffith.
To that end, Griffith has been a cookie dad for his daughters’ Girl Scout troops, and has served as treasurer for both troops. He’s also been parent association president at the Columbus School for Girls, which his older daughter attends.
He worked with his younger daughter to develop a polling system for Girl Scout cookie stands, drawing in customers with a video screen that showed customers’ favorite cookies. Griffith also printed each Scout an NFC card with her picture and her favorite cookie, and tapping a phone to the card automatically pulled up a cookie order form.
Outside of New Albany, Griffith serves as the board chairman for City Year Columbus, an Americorps program that unites Columbus City Schools students with recently-graduated peer mentors to help the students build the skills they need to succeed in school and beyond.
Griffith helps to recruit new board members and keep them engaged, and was also part of the search team for a new executive director.
“Service is something that he’ll always make time for,” Nelson says.
Business leadership
Yes, you can still check out that nearly 30-year-old Animal Farm book report. Griffith continues to maintain the website he built in 1996, www.bradgriffith.com.
Griffith is committed to the well-being of his employees, he says, starting with the four-day work week and the fully remote working arrangement that allows employees to live their lives and invest in themselves. Griffith has also participated in Healthy New Albany’s Wellness Works program to put on educational workshops on stretching, yoga, nutrition and more for his team.
“I think he sets a good example for how to run a company that people enjoy working for,” says Neil Collins, onsite leader for Innovate New Albany.
Collins and Griffith have been working together for more than a decade, with their biggest collaboration being the TIGER business education program they started in 2015. Collins can always count on Griffith and his team to bring energy, inspiration and good listening skills to programs, he says.
“When you’re working hard and working long hours to make something good, all those things matter a lot,” Collins says.
One of Buckeye Innovation’s other projects involved collaborating with Smart Columbus, which works to increase access to electronic devices and other digital resources. Buckeye Innovation helped to build a digital skills hub for the organization, making it possible for less tech-savvy people to sign up for digital skills classes without having to fill out complex forms.
Other work Griffith and his team have done includes:
- Developing two new intranet systems, one for police and one for other staff, for the City of New Albany
- Launching a new website for New Albany Parks and Recreation
- Managing the websites for Innovate New Albany, the New Albany Chamber and Healthy New Albany, among others
- Building a new website and a volunteer management system for Buddy Up for Life, a national, New Albany-based organization that offers adaptive athletic opportunities for children with Down syndrome
“We’re building out a suite of tools for nonprofits to use, and the volunteer management component is the first one,” Griffith says.
Nelson recalls working with Griffith to put on a program at a local assisted living facility in which he and his team talked about device safety, social media use and other topics in ways that were easy for the residents to understand.
“He’s someone that people trust and they know (they can come to) if they have a tech question or need a referral or are encountering (a problem),” she says.
Technology education
Griffith has served in a variety of roles for the New Albany Chamber, as well as the Columbus Chamber of Commerce.
In 2024, the New Albany Chamber hosted a multi-chamber expo in conjunction with its counterparts in Johnstown and Pataskala. For it, Griffith and his team built a sophisticated attendee check-in system. Each exhibitor had a card at its table, and attendees could tap their phone on each card to log their visit, making it possible for all of them to know which tables they’d been to. On top of that, Buckeye Innovation built a leaderboard showing which attendees visited the most exhibitors and which exhibitors had the most visitors.
Griffith has been a staple of Innovate New Albany’s TIGER Talks program, putting on workshops on databases, quick website building and – most recently – vibe coding. In addition, for years, he’s done an annual tech update after attending the CES tech show in Las Vegas, helping local business leaders understand the latest innovations.
“He comes back and brings hundreds of pictures of things he saw, and talks about things he thinks are significant for the benefit of us who don’t have the privilege of going,” Collins says.
Garth Bishop is a contributing writer at CityScene Media Group. Feedback welcome at feedback@cityscenemediagroup.com.
