Fellow Nerds and eager nonprofits have been asking, “When will registration be open for the Twin Cities’ 2012 Nerdery Overnight Overnight Website Challenge?” How about right now? Here.
As Luke Bucklin said in 2008 when we announced the second comingof our nonprofit nerdathon, “We are committed to this event as long as there are good nonprofits whose websites could be better, powered by nerds.”
That blanket-statement of commitment crossed state lines last summer at Chicago’s inaugural Nerdery Overnight Website Challenge, and March 24-25 will mark our fifth Nerdery Overnight Website Challenge in the Twin Cities. In the first five years of these nerdy deeds done dirt cheap, volunteers from The Nerdery and the interactive community at-large have donated about $2 million worth of professional services to 66 nonprofits. We’ll continue to consider this just a good start. Get started at http://tc2012.overnightwebsitechallenge.com.
For more the nitty-gritty lowdown and more information about this year’s event. Head on over to our News section.
Kinship of Greater Minneapolis is a youth mentoring program that brings children together with caring adults to form lasting quality relationships. At The Nerdery Overnight Website Challenge, this nonprofit’s designated team of volunteer web pros went by the name of 5 Men, 4 Women and an Animal (during their more normal working hours, they all work for Dolan Media). Check out the new website they created for Kinship:
“MN Senior Corps connects thousands of seniors to volunteer opportunities across the state’s 4000+ partner locations. Their old website had very general information about the program and then a number to call or a form to fill out for more info. A Senior Corps employee would then find out which county they were hoping to volunteer in and connect them with the right person. It was a huge headache for them and the user.
“MN Senior Corps had some ideas on how to make this simple, but we took it a significant step forward. The main idea we brought to them was doing some geolocation to automatically find out which county a site visitor was in, bypassing any manual county look up or searching. Our thought was simple. We can figure out where they are…so let’s save a step and tell them. Once we all knew that was going to solve the main issue MN Senior Corps was having, we looked for other hopes and dreams they had. We found that they had tons of great volunteer stories from seniors across the state, from every county. We learned that they had nowhere to display these stories. So we created a tool to add stories to the site and admin tools to select stories to approve for public viewing on the site…giving them the option to randomly display them across the site, or let them set specific stories on specific pages.
“In the design process, we also gave them a new identity. We also came up with a tagline and wrote nearly all the copy for the site. Overall, the design is all about ease of use, cutting down barriers and engaging a less tech-savvy population.”
MSP WordPress meetings are free and open to the public; you need not be a developer to check it out from 6:30-9 p.m. Thursday. There’ll be a session on creating basic WordPress plugins. Please RSVP so we know how many pizzas to order.
Visitors: The Nerdery is open during construction, but please note that we’ve recently knocked down walls to liberate/occupy some much needed adjacent office space.
Before The Nerdery Overnight Website Challenge, The Bloomington Sun newspaper called The Bloomington Chorale’s website “antiquated” – perhaps the nicest word they could print in a family-friendly publication. Things are much better now at bloomingtonchorale.com thanks to a transformational performance by Team Ratchet’s volunteer web pros. For resuscitating what was arguably the least effective/attractive website of the antiquated bunch, Team Ratchet earned a spot in the judges’ Final Four. Watch below as volunteers Heather Davis and George Hilal reveal the long list of interactive goodies they gave freely to a nonprofit they’d only just met.
It seemed like a no-brainer for matchmakers at the Overnight Website Challenge to pair the nonprofit Rural Renewable Energy Alliance (RREAL) with a volunteer team known as The Mighty Polymorphin Power Rangers: Global Warming. See how the Rangers delivered the goods. Cliffhanger alert: a bevy of bonus goods are revealed in the second video.
Nonprofits: April 23 is the application deadline for this year’s Social Entrepreneur’s Cup; winning it last year was RREAL’s Golden Ticket to the Overnight Website Challenge. Our offer stands for the nonprofit that wins this year’s Cup, so apply here.
Congrats to RREAL for making the most of their Golden Ticket. Kudos also to Power Ranger captain Jon Pettersson and special congrats to his productive teammate Jon Rexeisen, who – to resolve that other cliffhanger – did indeed become a father about a week after his team’s overnight success. Jon Rexeisen will lead Nerdery webinars this week on developing apps for the iPad (his other new baby). RSVP at http://nerdery.com/ipad.
First, a blanket thanks to all who made the 2010 Nerdery Overnight Website Challenge our best yet. While this friendly competition has an all-encompassing winners’ circle, top billing goes to the champs, Team Placeholder – whose designated nonprofit, Dakota Wicohan, had no website whatsoever when our last long-lost weekend began. Look at them now, and watch how their team (which included eight people from Larsen, a design, branding, marketing and interactive agency) delivered the goods, literally overnight.
RSVP here for our “Interactive on Impossible Deadlines” webinar next Thursday at 3:00 p.m. Central (we’re back on normal business hours), featuring Team Placeholder captain Reid Durbin (from Larsen) and other Nerdery Overnight Website Challenge vets.
OK, the previous blanket statement of thanks to the many Challenge supporters simply will not do. We’re gonna have to name names.
Competition is good, but judging such a competition could not have been easy – and for making tough choices in a timely yet thoughtful and gracious manner, we thank our judges:
Christine Durand, communication director, Minnesota Council of Nonprofits
Dan Grigsby, founder of Mobile Orchard and tech community organizer
Bob Huff, head of LaBreche Branding
Dana Nelson, executive director, GiveMN.org
We can’t sufficiently thank sponsors Benchmark Learning, LaBreche and ReliaCloud for supporting our nerdathon and its participants in their own meaningful ways. Benchmark Learning will donate training to nonprofits and give half-price rates to volunteer developers. They also hosted our pre-Challenge mixer, providing space (and beverages) for constructive speed dating. LaBreche, our frequent agency partner, joined us this year as an event sponsor and treated all the nonprofits to a pre-Challenge branding/interactive strategy session. VISI offered each nonprofit complimentary web hosting, including the option for its ReliaCloud service; they also provided each volunteer developer a $100 ReliaCloud credit.
We’d also like to send a shout out to all of our in-kind donors and meal sponsors who helped us to make sure that while participants may have been tired, at least they weren’t running on empty.
Bruegger’s (five stores donated a combined 340 bagels)
Chipotle (two stores donated a combined 200 burritos)
Cub (Minnetonka store donated gift card for groceries)
Jimmy Johns (two stores donated a combined five sandwich trays)
Kowalski’s (donated gift card for groceries)
Peace Coffee (donated 25 pounds of coffee)
Pizza Luce’ (donated 40 pizzas)
Red Bull (donated five cases of canned sleep substitute)
These companies also supported The Challenge in their own unique ways:
Adobe (prize donation of Flash Builder 3)
Arthouse (generously stepped up w/swag-bag donations)
GitHub (provided source code repositories)
Flashbelt (prize donation, tickets to conference)
Pilotvibe (pro-bono audio recording and editing for nonprofits/teams, including Dakota Wicohan)
Telerik (donated Sitefinity ASP.NET CMS to .NERD team)
Unwind Within (chair massages to revive weary workers)
We (the “royal we” of Mark Hurlburt and I) want to personally thank Nerdery founders Luke Bucklin, Mike Derheim, Mike Schmidt for having the vision to see how much good an event like this can do in our community, and having the faith to let us take time away from our “real” jobs to further our ongoing experiment of mixing the nerdy with the needy. Also, thanks for being there to make the first of many pots of coffee (Luke), making multiple food runs (Mike D) and a midnight run for more coffee creamer (Mike S). And, oh yeah, about 3,800 hours of professional web development services were freely given to 16 nonprofits last weekend because of your willingness to run with an idea (Hurlburt’s) that was (and remains) just mad enough to work.
In addition to having volunteers on five of 16 development teams and the aforementioned extras on-hand, The Nerdery also dispatched a band of volunteers who came (and many stayed) to help keep the event running as smoothly as possible. Thanks to Jessica Mogen, Matt Tonak, Jodi Chromey, David Kam, Annette Johnson, Ginger Sorvari Bucklin, Heidi Schmidt, Kai Esbensen, Kris Szafranski, Dave Bucklin, Theresa Dahlberg, Brendan Beckham, Bruce Peterson, Simon Banks, Sara Tabor, Sonja Peterson, Bill Titler, Scott Spillman, Tony Webster and Merne Williams.
Our hosts at the U of M Continuing Education Conference Center deserve props for again letting us rock-star their fine facility, with particular thanks to Ken Gay, Mike Wybierala, Leslie Berry and Wendy Hanson.
The crescendo from the orchestra pit tells me I’ve rambled long enough, so thanks again, everyone – particularly anyone I’ve fool-heartedly forgotten.
On this blog, we’ll continue to post profiles of the finished sites created at The Nerdery Overnight Website Challenge, so stay tuned.
Nonprofit reps and volunteers met-up last Thursday evening to prep for the March 20-21 Nerdery Overnight Website Challenge. Hosted by Challenge sponsor Benchmark Learning, the pre-Challenge mixer was mostly dedicated to a speed-dating exercise during which volunteers made the rounds for a bit of face time with each of the 16 nonprofit organizations – knowing their teams of 9-10 web pros will work pro-bono for one of them, but of course, not knowing which org they’ll serve until March 20, with the big reveal just moments before the 24-hour countdown begins.
Before the nerdy/needy speed-dating began, several secrets of Overnight success were revealed by the Praxis team (defending champs), represented by Colle+McVoy’s Jason Striegel and The Nerdery’s Brian Litzenger. We’ve copied their notes and posted them verbatim below, but before you read and reread them, check out the good deeds they did for District 202 at last year’s Overnight Website Challenge.
Overnigt Website Challenge Strategery (unabridged), brought to you by Praxis:
In General
Come prepared
Get your critical thinking tasks done as early in the game as possible.
Assess risks as early as possible. You don’t want to be solving challenging problems at 4 AM in the morning.
Work in small bursts. Attack something concrete 30-60 minutes. Accomplish it. Take a 10-minute break.
Teams
Designate roles now:
server / connectivity / tech support
database guru
source control and backup master
back-end cms team
front-end html/css integration team
flash / jquery / front end dev
design team
writing / content plan
ia / wire-frames
producer
sweeper
special ops
Designate a person who can respect everyone’s opinions and who will make tough choices when there are differences of opinion. Democracy and waiting for consensus do not work well on short timelines. Choose the 1 person who you can all be angry at. Ideally, this would be your producer or your team lead.
Choose your tools – server environment, dev language, frameworks, CMS, plugins, etc.
Go with what you know.
Research what you don’t know. You don’t want to be figuring too much out the night of.
Have an expert on your team for anything you’re choosing to use.
Have a backup plan if things don’t work out. If that new CMS you’ve been wanting to use doesn’t work out the way you were planning, be prepared to fall back on that clumsy solution that you know you know like the back of your hand. Be prepared to make this hard decision within a few hours of starting.
Set up your server now.
Get everything you plan to use running.
Make sure everyone will be able to connect to it.
Test / simulate if possible.
You DO NOT want to spend the first 3 hours trying to sort through connectivity issues, getting people passwords, and figuring out how to turn off php magic-quotes and get mod-rewrite working correctly in order to get your CMS running.
Use source control.
Or, have a really good plan for making snapshot backups.
Have one or two people on the team make local backups at key checkpoints…
Count on someone trashing the wrong folder and deleting 4 hours of work at 6AM in the morning – that someone will probably be you.
Plan your attack
Get the whole team together for the first hour to discuss your plan with the client.
Make sure you understand their audience(s) before you begin anything else.
Make a site map. the client will hopefully bring their ideas to get the discussion started.
Content audit – understand what needs to be written, what images need to be obtained, where to source content for each section of the site map.
Spend time wireframing.
Listen to your client. Stand with what you believe is the right solution, but if you disagree on something in these early stages, don’t be afraid to listen some more. It’s worth the time. Remember that you both want to make the best site possible.
Outside of the standard CMS and site dev, plan on tackling only 1 or 2 custom features that address a core business objective.
Have one owner per custom feature. this is your special ops dude(s).
Failure or difficulty here should not jeopardize the rest of the project.
Start work on your presentation right away
Assign a presenter.
This is a joint effort between the team presenter and the client.
Your presentation starts when you begin planning. The output of your planning session should be an outline for what you want to accomplish. You want to present that the next day as an outline of what you did accomplish.
Do not start preparing this at 6 in the morning. You will have the effective IQ of a can of V8. Nobody cares about what tomato and celery have to say.
Non-profits
Come prepared
You know your business better than anyone else.
The better you can communicate this to your team, the more effective your site will be.
The faster you can transfer this knowledge, the more time your team gets to work on making things to solve your problem.
Delegate expertise
Your team knows design, understands user experience, and has experience making successful sites.
Send an expert that can represent and communicate your organization’s's mission, brand, and message.
Allow your team to choose the tools they feel will best enable them to solve your business problem.
Understand your objectives
What does your web site need to accomplish? What’s your goal? What would a successful site look like / what role would it perform? Who does your site need to talk to? Clients? Donors? Volunteers? The Public? Staff?
Rank those audiences in order of their importance with respect to the site. Who does the site need to serve: Volunteers, Clients, and then Donors or Clients, Donors, and then Volunteers. This is hard, but you need to make a decision here.
For each audience, what does the site need to do for them?
Why do they come to your site?
What do they want to accomplish when they get there?
What do you want to entice them to do?
Make a sitemap
You can do this on a whiteboard or with post-its.
Make a page for each piece of content that you can think of: home page, how to volunteer, about us, staff, location map, what we do, etc.
Make sure you have accommodated the content that is essential for your primary audiences.
Organize these pages into groups.
Sometimes it helps to start first by grouping by audience.
Also try grouping it by subject matter.
Try to keep the site from being more than 3 levels deep. Then aim to organize things at a max of 2 levels deep. Can you take it to one level? Find the balance between organization and the ease with which users can find your content.
Plan your content
Does a page include photos?
Other than just a few paragraphs of text, are there other relevant data types to think about? Dates, youtube videos, inventory, links to other pages.
Special pages to consider with specific logic and data: job postsings, events, press releases, blogs, etc.
Find your content
Plan on bringing everything to the event that might be edited and incorporated into the final site.
Any content, images, or copy that isn’t brought to the event ready-to-go and awesome will need to be produced and written before it can be edited and incorporated into the site. Is this where you want your team to be spending their time?
You might be lucky and have a word-smith on your team. It’s also possible that you’ll end up with programmers writing your homepage copy. Think about that.
Logos, and brand assets. Vector format, if possible.
Plan on participating
You should expect to be a major contributor to your team.
Your contribution will make the work better.
A joint effort will be a huge motivator for all team members. At 5:00AM, you don’t want any team members feeling like slave labor. Your skin in the game will prevent that from happening.
Again, you have unique and special knowledge about your organization that can only make the work more relevant.
A Few Notes About Sleep
Try and oversleep for at least 2 or three days prior to the event.
If you think you need sleep, plan on taking a cat nap or two. If you are used to pushing through, do that.
Pace yourself with the expectation of diminishing returns on effort as time goes on. Try to get 80% of the work done in the first 12 hours, 15% of the work in the next 6 hours, and 4.5% of the work in the next 5, and the final .5% of work will be painstakingly constructed with the help of sleep-dep hallucinations and a few remaining slack-jawed, drooling, meat bags that you used to call teammates.
Beware of caffeine and sugar.
It can help keep you awake, but it doesn’t mean you’re making smart decisions.
You will crash at some point.
Caffeine might get you to 6:30AM. At 6:31 you may become a zombie.
If you need them, save the stimulants for the last minute, just before you absolutely need them.
Bananas.
Step out the door and breath oxygen on occasion.
Pay attention to the happiness of your team members. People will get cranky. Crankiness is infective as it is ineffective. Try to cheer each other up before the whole team’s mood goes sour.
Thus concludes the free advice from Praxis. Jason seemed pretty serious about his endorsement for bananas, and as thanks for sharing his team’s advice we’ll be sure to have plenty.
Before speed-dating began, the nonprofits also heard about free training they’ll get from mixer hosts Benchmark Learning (formerly New Horizons of Minnesota), free branding and digital communications advice they’ll get from LaBreche, and options for free web hosting they’ll get from VISI, including their ReliaCloud option. They also heard from Brian Peterson, a nonprofit veteran from last year, who returned to tell his experience working with perennial favorites Pollywog Stew to create a new site for a nonprofit he co-founded, Students Today, Leaders Forever; check out their transformation, including before/after shots.
