Crowdsourcing Your Nonprofit Website

§ July 2nd, 2010 § Filed under Uncategorized § No Comments

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.

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 different CMS options 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

§ June 30th, 2010 § Filed under Uncategorized § No Comments

As you may well know, recently a large part of my life was spent reworking the Wildlife SOS website.

Along with Kate Schnepel, we decided to use crowdsourcing to get the design of the site. In hindsight, it might have been riskier than it felt at the time, but if you’ve seen the new site….and like it….you’ll agree that is was an excellent decision.

After discussing this project with my friend David J. Neff, he asked if I would write a blog post about the experience for his blog, 501derful.org. So I did!

Please go check out the post, and post your thoughts on crowdsourcing!

Leaving…

§ May 21st, 2010 § Filed under Uncategorized § No Comments

I’ll miss the Red Rocks
I’ll miss the lack of traffic
I’ll miss coming to work at one of the most picturesque places on the face of this earth
I’ll miss all the animals
I’ll miss all my friends
I’ll miss daily interaction with all my awesome co-workers
I’ll miss desert sunsets
I’ll miss the dust (actually I won’t miss that at all)
I’ll miss the vibe of the western US
I’ll miss not being within driving distance of Salt Lake and all my awesome friends there
I’ll miss rooting for the Jazz – yep, gotta be a Hawks fan again

I will, however, be close to my family and that’s why I am moving to Atlanta.

Best Friends has been wonderful to me, and they continue to be, allowing me to carry on in my role as Internet Marketing Manager. I’ll work remotely, still visiting Kanab several times a year.

I miss my parents
I miss my sister
I miss my brother-in-law (don’t tell him I said that)
I miss my Niece, Ruby

I need that support system, so it’s time to go.

Little Ruby

§ May 9th, 2010 § Filed under Uncategorized § 1 Comment

One of the nice things about being in Atlanta for an extra week was being able to see Ruby. She’s 20 months already and growing up so fast. I know I am biased, but I do think she’s very smart, and of course she’s adorable (biased or not, that’s not up for debate!). It was nice to hear, “Jon-Jon” being yelled all week as she was looking to show me the next cool thing.

Here are some photos of the time there..

My favorite story from the week. She wanted a draw a picture. So we pull out a piece of paper the crayons. After about 4 minutes of mad scribbling and putting stickers on the page, she decided the drawing was, “done.” So we walk over to the fridge to put it up. We get half way to the kitchen, she stops and says, “more, more.” So we head back, get back down on the floor and keep going.

Then back to the kitchen, we put it up with the magnets. She stares at her creation for a few moments and says, “more, more.” So back to the living room to make it perfect. Adorable.

Car Crash

§ February 15th, 2010 § Filed under Uncategorized § No Comments

Sometimes life really just pours it on all at once. I guess it’s my time for that.

This morning while heading into work, I was following one of our maintenance guys in a truck that, unfortunately, doesn’t have a lot in the way of mirrors. Well, it has mirrors, but the bed is so wide it’s hard for them to see behind.

As we were going down the road into the village at Best Friends, a large piece of equipment they use to fix the potholes in the road was coming the other way. We both stopped.

The guy in front I guess figured he needed to back up to let him pass, and before I could even realize it he was in reverse and heading my way. I just didn’t have the time to react and he went right into me. The damage:

Maybe looks more cosmetic, but it did puncture the radiator as my car was weeping some sort of fluid on the ground. Thankfully it will get fixed, but it means in the meantime I am without my sweet little Explorer.

Sigh.

The Plight of the Leopard

§ February 12th, 2010 § Filed under Uncategorized § No Comments

Wildlife SOS works to save many, many species. But maybe none do I WANT to see helped more than the Leopard.

It’s a tragic story of man-animal conflict, and in these cases neither wins. Well, maybe man eventually will prevail, but always to the detriment of the animal and always with casualties along the way.

These majestic creatures lived happily in the wild in the Indian State of Maharashtra. These animals are a victim of development. Like many animals, loss of habitat forced them into survival mode. Wild land turned into farmed sugar fields. The Leopards still, sadly, found the sugar fields a livable habitat; gave birth to cubs, and in an effort to protect them turned to killing people.

The response, of course, was not to move out of the Leopard habitat, but instead to remove the Leopards.

Some were released, others however, were placed in a Centre in Junnar, Maharashtra (about four hours from Mumbai). The Government made a call to Wildlife SOS asking for help running the Centre they had created to care for the cats. Woefully inadequate, the Leopards need our help.

Some have enclosures have what you see in the second photo. Others have what you see above. Even the best enclosures simply are not good enough. They are too small, not natural enough, and have no place to hide. Leopards don’t like to be seen, but the current digs basically put them on display.

We have plans this year to fund as much of this project as possible. The land exists at Junnar to build natural, beautiful enclosures, all that is needed is the money. If you want to help you can donate to Wildlife SOS here.