Crowd Sourcing your Nonprofit Website Pt 2

So who won?

The Winning Design

Our developer, Heather Gardner-Madras can attest to this, our design was not necessarily web ready. Genius Rocket Creative, and designer of the entry we chose as winner, Alexandra Pokras, put together an amazing design which we loved, but making it into a website was the next challenge.

For those who may not know Heather, you should. She’s a passionate web developer who cares about causes and making them shine online. She gave us solid recommendations on CMS’ and which was likely to best serve our needs (we ended up with Drupal – and it rocks!). She helped us work through some of our site architecture. She helped us understand modules that would best help us achieve our goals. And above all else she never handed the reins over until we knew what we were doing and still is more than happy to help us as we move along! Mostly, maybe, for her benefit (breaking a site can be a complicated “undo”), but we are well trained today to be able to handle the site.

Overall I would call the experience positive. We believe we have a forward thinking design that is of the web “now.” I don’t know if I would recommend crowd-sourcing for every project that a nonprofit faces, but with limited financial resources it is definitely an option that could result in you meeting your project goals.

We’d love for you to take a look at our website and tell us what you think!

Have you crowd-sourced a project? How’d it work for you?

Do you think crowd-sourcing is a smart choice for nonprofits?

Crowd Sourcing Your Nonprofit Web Site

Guest post by Jon Dunn

Being intrigued by the idea of crowd-sourcing through companies such as Genius Rocket is one thing, actually taking the plunge and spending donor dollars on the service is quite another. That’s the predicament I found myself in several months ago.

I work as a volunteer for an Indian wildlife organization, Wildlife SOS. In 2005, the organization incorporated in the US and we handle as much for them as we can from this side of the globe. We can’t get out there and save snakes, leopards and bears, but we can help them with their web presence, e-newsletters, etc. A new website had been needed for some time and finally the money was available to get it together.

But when I say money, I don’t mean like, lots of money. I mean, small nonprofit money. For that reason, we looked into every free, low-cost, volunteer, templatized option available out there today. Many seemed “doable” but as everyone does, we wanted more. We wanted a beautiful website that was easy to use and was powered by a powerful but simple CMS that would make maintenance a breeze. But again, our budget was small. The perfect clients, you could say.

I called Michael Mossoba, with Genius Rocket (we met at SXSWi at 3am in the Hilton lobby – ahhhh, SXSW)and we walked through the process of creating a project with their service. Just as in almost any other RFP process, we would lay out all of our requirements, hopes, and dreams and provide the basic creative needed to complete the project. The only difference here is that through Genius Rocket it’s called an RFB (Request For Brilliance – yeah, I groaned too).

Genius Rocket now has more than 10,000 creatives in their “bullpen” so to speak, ready to work on your project. Many only do graphic design, or videography, but many do all of the above. They guided us with a basic cost structure for what they call awards for the winning project. The whole project was uploaded and ready to go from our end, literally within minutes – as previously mentioned, it is critical you gather as much information on your end as to what you need. That is, if you are looking for something specific. If you want to see what 10,000 designers will create, give very few details and you will certainly get back entries that run the gamut.

We offered $1,200 for the winning design, and gave three weeks for entries to be submitted. We asked for a layered .psd of a homepage design. We gave our main navigation points (we worked hard on completely reorganizing the layout through a site-map long before this point) and expressed a chance of further work from the winning designer post-competition for the interior pages.

Entries came in slowly, and I will confess that I felt a little worried at times that we really weren’t going to get anything that seemed usable. The level of work varied greatly from designs that looked like works of art, to others that were clearly from designers just getting their feet wet in the medium.

So who won? Tune in tomm…

Why are we doing this to East Austin Kids?

Guest post from my friends over at GivingCity Magazine:

Backstory: In March, I wrote a post about Southwest Key’s efforts to improve the educational opportunities and help strengthen the community for the people living where Southwest Key lives, Central East Austin around the former Johnston High School, now Eastside Memorial High School.

In that post, I talked about learning how Southwest Key established the East Austin Children’s Promise, which it modeled on the Harlem Children’s Zone. The HCZ itself serves as a model for the federal government’s new Promise Neighborhoods planning grants, which will offer about $500,000 to about 20 community efforts like HCZ around the country. Southwest Key — the Juan Sanchez team — is applying for a planning grant.

A few weeks after writing that post, I had lunch with Allen Weeks, a community organizer who lives in the St. John’s neighborhood in Northeast Austin, and has also worked to improve educational opportunities and help strengthen the community for people living where he lives. The Weeks team has organized a large collaboration to apply for a Promise Neighborhoods planning grant as well, this one for the Northeast Austin neighborhood around Reagan High School.

I wondered if it helped or hindered Austin’s chances to have two grant applications competing among the 900+ nationwide. And regardless of that, does the competition help East Austin?

Applications due today: Recent Statesman news stories, editorials and blog posts about the Promise Neighborhoods planning grants pick Weeks’ team over Sanchez’, saying that the former effort was better planned and includes more heavy-hitting collaborators, including AISD, UT, City of Austin, St. David’s Foundation, United Way Capital Area and more. They also criticize the Sanchez team for not being as well prepared and for being sore losers.

All this just substantiates the point I was trying to make in my March blog post: In a city the size of Austin and considering the plight of so many East Austin students, are we really allowed infighting? Still?

I think even AISD Superintendent Maria Carstarphen said something along those lines, too. At the same time, though, Carstarphen inherited what many believe to be a history of AISD’s inability to address the educational needs of East Austin.  Maybe the AISD of the past could have evolved its approach to account for the increasingly diverse and urban population?

AISD needs to do that now, and working with both Promise Neighborhood grant applicants should be a top priority. I’d love to know exactly what each team was asking from AISD. “Support” can come in many forms; surely AISD can support two efforts in some way.

I’d also love to know more about why the Statesman thinks the Northeast Austin proposal was stronger. It’s been reported that Southwest Key didn’t submit its proposal to AISD until the last minute, in June, but it was also reported that Sanchez said he’d been trying to meet with Southwest Key for months. And it’s not like AISD didn’t know about Southwest Key’s charter  school; the East Austin College Prep academy enrolled 90 6th-graders in 2009 and now has a waiting list for its 6th and 7th grades.

The only amendment I can add to this story is, maybe Carstarphen needs to include AISD among her mention of the infighting adults.

PS 1: Here’s a listing of some of the communities Austin is up against. There were 941 “intents to apply.” The grant applications are due today, June 28. Grants will be made available this September.

PS 2: Also, here’s what I read for fun on a Sunday night: A link to the PDF of FAQs about the Promise Neighborhoods planning grant applications.

PS 3: After spending hours with both Weeks and Juan Sanchez, Southwest Key’s CEO, I got the impression I was looking at two sides of the same coin. Both are effective and passionate community leaders, but each approaches their work with completely different strategies. It’s worth getting to know both of them better to learn which of their two distinctively different leadership styles is more effective for East Austin in the long run.

Volunteer Gig: It’s Hot, can you help? Driving Kids in Austin

How easy is this? Consider helping this amazing cause out today, they are right here in Austin, TX and need your help.

“I teach a free ESL class for immigrant kids, which is open to children from about 39 countries.  The teaching is free, and I give them all their school supplies, and every time they come to class I give them a few books in English to take home to keep.  I am writing because I am hoping you may know someone who can help me with one problem I am having.

There are refugee kids who want to come but who don’t have transportation. They know how to ride city buses, but the closest one stops at least a mile from the class site, and they’d have to walk in July and August heat, and sometimes rain, plus walk over a railroad track.  These kids are all here legally (their families have escaped  from places such as Burma, Bhutan, and so forth, and then been invited here by the U.S. government), and their parents have SS #’s, I-94’s, etc.   The kids could be picked up at the 1700 block of Rutland, or at a central point amongst a group of apartments one block north of Lamar and Denson, or at a central point on Reinli one block east of I-35.

There are little groups of children at each location, and being able to include even a few kids of them would really be a good thing.  They have not signed up yet because they don’t have any way to get to the class.

The class begins on June 28th and ends on August 6th.  It meets on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, from 2 – 5 p.m. The class will be held at a community center on Duval Road, between 183 and Mopac.”
Can you help drive these kids during the day?”
Contact:

Elaine M. Allan, B.S.,J.D., retired
borntohelp@earthlink.net

cell (512)750-7730