Al Franken’s Welcome Message to the WebChallenge

Senator Al Franken couldn’t make it this year but he did send a very kind video message to cheer on the nerds and nonprofits.

The Official Pairings

We’re about 50 minutes into the 24-hour Webchallenge and the nerds have met their nonprofits. Here’s the official pairings:

1. The Return of the Team Redundancy Team Part 2 is teamed with Minnesota Environmental Partnership.
2. Codex is teamed with Minnesota Coalition for the Homeless.
3. Push N Run is teamed with Hourcar
4. Twin Cities EE is teamed with Franconia Sculpture Park
5. Raxacoricofallapatorius with The Windmill Project.
6. PHP Nerds- Beta with Answer
7. Drupal Rocks! with Bakken Museum.
8. Full Court WordPress with Youth Performance Company
9. Ruby.MN with Career Solutions Inc.
10. Two Unicorns, One Moon with West African Medical Missions
11. Team BIOS with Community Neighborhood Housing Services
12. Drop Shadows Not Bombs with North Star Therapy Animals
13. Team Pegacorn with Metro CISM Team
14. Run PHP with Cancer Legal Line
15. Get Off My LAN with TVBYGIRLS
16. Ruby Off Rails with Center for Homicide Research
17. Sleep-Deprivation Research Team #4 with The Valley Friendship Club
18. The Royal Canadian Kilted Yaksmen with Little Voyageurs Montessori School

Our annual pre-challenge advice for nerds & nonprofits (new & improved!)

We’re two days way from the fifth Twin Cities Overnight Website Challenge. Over the years we’ve culled quite a bit of advice from web pros, nonprofits, and our own nerds alike. Every year, in an effort to help you be as prepared as possible for the 24-hour nerd-a-thon, we update this post and share it with you.

Are you a webchallenge vet? Leave your helpful hints in the comments and we’ll add them to this list for next time!

Advice for All Attendees

• Bring slippers and sweatpants! Who wants to be wearing jeans at 3am?
• Load up on Free Buzz Aeropress, regular or iced.
• Drink lots of water and remember that at 3AM you might not be as productive as you wish you were, and that’s okay. Patience is key. Try to relax, enjoy it, and be satisfied with whatever you’re able to accomplish.
• Bananas help keep you awake and focused. True story.
• Plan a ride home afterward. You don’t want to drive after being up that long.
• Bring a toothbrush and deodorant, so you can get all prim and proper prior to our presentation.
• Bring Chapstick, Burt’s Bees, or whatever your lip balm of choice is. Trust us, you’ll be happy you did.
• There will be a “crash room,” lights out and quiet. It will have two twin-sized air mattresses up for grabs, or you can curl up on the floor. Some nerds are bringing sleeping bags (others choose to curl up in the entrails of a ton-ton).

Advice for web pros

Come prepared

• Get your critical thinking tasks done as early in the game as possible.
• Assess risks as early as possible, too. You don’t want to be solving challenging problems at 4 AM.
• Work in small bursts. Attack something concrete for 30-60 minutes. Accomplish it. Take a 10-minute break.

Designate roles now
Designate a person who can respect everyone’s opinions and can diplomatically make tough choices when there are differences of opinion. Democracy and waiting for consensus don’t work well on short timelines. Choose the one person who you can all be angry at. Ideally, this would be your producer or your team lead. Other roles to designate:

• 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

Get your tools in order

• Choose your tools – server environment, dev language, frameworks, CMS, plugins, etc.
• Staying in sync with your team is critical. Consider what IM everyone will use, and email addresses. Share a list with everyone or create a mailing list. Come prepared with a platform to work on, be it a CMS or framework, and work out dev server logistics, passwords, svn/git users for all your team members.
• Go with what you know. Also, from one of our nerds: Our team made use of Nerdery’s Google Docs for info/collaboration last year, same with svn. Point is, you do this stuff every day, rely on your proven workflow and tools.
• Research what you don’t know. You don’t want to be figuring too much out the night of the challenge.
• Have an expert on your team for anything you’re choosing to use.

Have a backup plan. If that new CMS you wanted to use doesn’t work out the way you were planning, be prepared to fall back on that clumsy solution you know like the back of your hand. Be prepared to make this hard decision within a few hours of starting.

Be connected

• Determine if everyone is using their own sandbox on their computer or a central server. If using a server, set it up before you get to the webchallenge.
• 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 three hours of the challenge sorting through connectivity issues, getting passwords, and figuring out how to turn off php magic-quotes and get mod-rewrite working correctly in order to get your CMS running.

Back it up

• 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 four hours of work at 6AM – 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.
• Get hosting figured out right away, get all their credentials in one place: social media logins, domain registrar info, etc. Assign someone to own this information with the non-profit.

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. Also, LIMIT THE SCOPE! You won’t get as much done as you want. Most non-profits will shoot for the moon and be scattered on their priorities. Help them get there but also help them remain realistic on expectations for what can be accomplished.

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 people (person).
• Failure or difficulty here should not jeopardize the rest of the project.

The Presentation

• 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 six in the morning. You will have the effective IQ of a can of V8. Nobody cares about what tomato and celery have to say.

Advice from the Judging Corner

• Listen, listen, listen to your nonprofit’s needs and objectives. The more your site’s features can reflect what your nonprofit is asking for, the better.
• The judging happens during the last 3 hours of the 24-hour window. No, your site doesn’t have to be 100% done for the presentation, but it should be at a place where you can demo something.
• Focus on your site, not your presentation. The judges love seeing your site. Not your Powerpoint. Demo > Powerpoint. Seriously.
• Be sure to demo both the user experience and admin functions. If you’ve added custom admin features to your CMS, be sure to demo them. The judges want to know that the nonprofit can manage this site on their own.
• +1 to the Limit Your Scope advice. Judges are impressed with scope that can realistically be accomplished in 24 hours.
• Did I mention demo? Yeah, be ready to demo. Make sure you’ve got some functional site features. Enter content on key landing pages. QA your key functions. Solid demo = judge love.

Advice for nonprofits

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 believe will best enable them to solve your organization’s problem.

Understand your objectives

• What does your website 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 to 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 three levels deep. Then aim to organize things at a max of two 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 postings, 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.
• Images. Photography. Big. Beautiful. Personal. Bring them.
• 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 AM 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.

Overnight Website Challenge on WCCO News Radio

This morning Mark was on WCCO News Radio talking about this year’s webchallenge and some of things you can except Saturday. If you missed it you can listen to it and hear Mark say “nerd is the new cool.”

Mark talks about the Webchallenge on KARE-11

If you weren’t up an at ‘em by 9 a.m. Saturday and you happened to miss Mark on KARE-11 there’s no need to fear. We got your hook up right here. Also, on a related note, the application deadline for this year’s Overnight Website Challenge is February 27, which means you only have seven days left to sign up.

TECHdotMN talks with Nerds & Nonprofits about upcoming Webchallenge

Nerds Mark and Eric along with Jan Hansen from Educate Tanzania sat down with the folks at TECHdotMN to talk about the Overnight Website Challenge.

In this short video Mark covers the history of the Webchallenge, Eric offers advice to web pros looking to participate, and Jan Hansen discusses the impact the new webchallenge-created website has had on her organization. Take a look.

Also, just a reminder, the application deadline for nonprofits & web pros is February 27th. Sign up today!

Apply yourself: Overnight Website Challenge returns March 24-25

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.

$5 to keep a good-hearted nerd well caffienated

As you know our big Chicago Overnight Website Challenge is coming up August 20–21. But did you know you can help keep the kind, generous nerds who are donating 24 hours of their time to help build websites for needy nonprofits?

Well you can! Join Groupon’s G-Team and donate $5 to equip nerd volunteers with 24 hours of caffeine during the webchallenge. If G-Team members raise $250, 50 nerds taking part in the challenge will have enough caffeine to last them 24 hours. Each additional $5 raised will fund 24 hours of caffeine for another volunteer. All donations will be matched by The Nerdery.

For only $5 you can make sure that the nerds are deliriously awake enough for stuff like this (well, and the website building too, of course), and really isn’t that worth it?

What the heck is the G-Team? Here’s the deal: Unlike traditional Groupon deals, G-Team campaigns typically don’t offer you a “discount” or “savings.” So “buyer” beware—when you click “Buy” to donate your time or money to a worthwhile G-Team cause, the only discount you may receive is 100% off free, priceless karma.

Here’s the 10 Illinois’ nonprofits selected to participate in the Chicago Webchallenge

Today we announced the nonprofit organizations selected for the The Nerdery’s Chicago Overnight Website Challenge, debuting the weekend of August 20-21. The chosen nonprofits:

• A Safe Haven Foundation
• Crossroads Adoption Services
• Hemophilia Foundation of Illinois
• Institutio Del Progresso Latino
• Kids Have Hope
• Midwest Young Artists
• Near Northwest Arts Council
• Northwestern Settlement
• Peace Care
• Southwest Chicago Pads

These lucky nonprofits will receive nerdy deeds done dirt-cheap from these teams of volunteer web pros:

• A+ Team
• Awesome Dolphins and Friends
• Chamois Butter for Lunch
• Chicago on Rails
• Cloudbot (and Friends)
• Drop Shadows Not Bombs
• Drupal Rocks
• Greater Pixel Consortium
• Nerdery Bigfoot Research Consortium
• Team 13

Competing nonprofits articulated how they’d direct teams of 8-10 web pros to further their mission online. Selection judges also considered organizational need and online testimonials from people most intimately involved with the organizations. Comprised of leaders from the nonprofit and interactive communities, this independent panel of selection judges assessed applications from eligible nonprofits; they’ll also pick the top development team at The Nerdery’s all-nighter. Ladies and gentlemen, your judges:

• Melanie Adcock, assistant editor of The May Report and tech blogger
• Joshua Brown, Program Manager, Taproot Foundation
• Randy Dill, founder and CEO, Chicago Non-Profit
• Cynthia Putnam, Professor, College of Computing & Digital Media at DePaul University

You can learn more about the Chicago event over on the Webchallenge site.

Nerdy deeds via Chicago

This just handed to me:

Nerdery Overnight Website Challenge Coming to Chicago

Nonprofits and volunteer web pros (nerds) registering for 24-hour event Aug. 20-21. Charitable nerds have already donated $1.5 million in web services to 57  nonprofits.

Who: The Nerdery seeks like-minded web professionals to join in giving their time and talent to help nonprofits create websites they couldn’t otherwise afford at The Nerdery Overnight Website Challenge (http://chi2011.overnightwebsitechallenge.com/).

Who Else: Eligible nonprofits (501c3-registered organizations in Illinois) can apply by June 30 by articulating how nerds could help them do what they do – only better – online.

Why: Considering the collective good nonprofits do, losing sleep to help them is a wise investment – they pay it forward many times over by better serving our communities.

When: August 20-21, 2011; 9 a.m. Saturday – 9 a.m. Sunday

Where: Resolution Digital Studios (RDS), 2226 West Walnut Street, Chicago

How: Volunteer teams self-organize with at least eight and as many as 10 people – team captains recruit peers covering these skill sets: front-end development, back-end development, project management, strategy, UX, graphic design, copywriting and QA. Nonprofits apply by articulating their vision of how nerds could further their mission through better use of interactive technology. Fans of nonprofits post online testimonials on why the organization they support – or benefit from – should get a new website for the price of a good night’s sleep.

When else:

• July 15 – Nonprofit and volunteer registration deadline
• July 18 – Teams set
• July 25 – Announce chosen nonprofits

Who’s The Nerdery?: The Nerdery (www.nerdery.com) has offices in Chicago and Minneapolis where about 200 self-proclaimed nerds/web professionals partner with creative minds and big thinkers to envision and execute their interactive projects, including websites, mobile apps and social media. During the first four years of the Twin Cities’ annual Nerdery Overnight Website Challenge, volunteers have freely given more than $1.5 million in professional web development services to 57 nonprofits. Ranked #1 on Biz Journal’s 2010 Best Places to Work list, The Nerdery considers this a good start as they bring their nerdy deeds to Chicago.

Who Else: Sponsors include: Chipotle, Groupon, Peace Coffee, RDS. The Nerdery welcomes likeminded companies as event sponsors and in-kind supporters; to help feed and caffeinate this nonprofit nerdathon, email info@overnightwebsitechallenge.com or call 877-OMG-NERD.

See/Believe:

The Nerdery Overnight Website Challenge: An Overview from The Nerdery on Vimeo.

Media contact: Mark Malmberg, 612-850-3178, mark.malmberg@nerdery.com