Increase your nonprofit's visibility!

We're hosting an event with GuideStar and the Nonprofit Roundtable of Greater Washington this Friday, Sept 12 from 9-10:30am at the Meyer Foundation. The address is

1400 16thSt. NW
Washington, DC 20036.

Here's the event listing: http://www.nonprofitroundtable.org

If you're in the DC area and work for a nonprofit, you should definitely swing by and see what we're all about and how your organization can benefit from having a profile on our site. There's also free breakfast!

Back in the States

So after having been away in Cairo for 6wks I’m back in the country trying to get caught up with everything GNP-related. Except that this is my first time in DC, so I’m still in summer/tourist mode.

Cairo was, as my friend put it, “crazy challenging” but I loved it. I was learning Arabic and teaching English at a refugee school; most of the refugees are from Eritrea, Sudan, and Iraq with a few from Ethiopia, Somalia, and Burundi. I’ve worked and volunteered abroad before, but this was by far the best experience ever. My work (mainly helping 14-18 yr-old kids with their English writing ability) was both rewarding and frustrating. Rewarding in that I got to really get to know a few students and form a hopefully lasting relationship, but frustrating in my realization of how few rights they have in Cairo. They’re so disenfranchised even though they’re supposed to be accorded all the rights of an Egyptian citizen once they receive refugee status. And because they’re not allowed to work, a lot of teenage boys resort to gang violence. But I could really write a book on my experiences in Cairo, so I’ll stop now before this gets too long…

The transition back to America has been good. Amanda graciously took me in while I looked for housing, so that was really helpful and appreciated. Things are definitely moving slower over here than in SF, but hopefully by the end of the summer we will have established a strong foundation for things to really get off the ground. Tonight’s the happy hour, so I’m really excited about schmoozing and trying to get as many reviews as possible. Apparently Hawk n Dove is the place to be, so hopefully it’ll be a successful event.

I’ll check in later and update on our progress here in DC!

Check out the new video!

Updates on a sleepy afternoon

Yesterday Suj and I edited the training video footage with Sylvia, in her tall narrow house in Bernal Heights. It's the sort of house and the sort of neighborhood that seem to be unique to San Francisco: narrow houses crammed wall to wall and painted in the oddest mishmash of pastels; seamless concrete driveways substituting for lawns; a grassy park rising suddenly amidst it all. The quiet of Mission Street nearby unsettles me-- having grown up near Los Angeles, I'm used to main thoroughfares being noisy, crowded, and smoggy.

The training video is just a part of the training materials Suj and I are developing, as a (massive) sub-project of the (already massive) Replication Project. It ambushed me in the middle of the week, throwing off my plans for the rest of the week. I've had to push all my other deadlines back a week, and given that working on the training materials will likely consume any extra time I have over the next few days, it looks like those deadlines may have to be pushed back even farther. No wonder it takes so long to get things done... You begin a project excited and ambitious, but then you begin other projects just as excited and with just as much ambition, and suddenly they've all piled one on top of the other while time has grown both shorter (generally) and longer (after about 3pm or so most days).

But we've got some exciting stuff in the works, and it's fantastic that we're able to generate our own ideas, develop plans for them, and see them through to make them a reality. Yay startups!

Working 9-5...

I realize that I was the last person who posted on this blog, and it's kind of lame to do it again, but, at this point, I don't care.  It's 4:30 on a Friday afternoon and I'm not really sure why people work this hour, because no one else wants to pick up their phones or respond to their emails.  Everyone just wants to get it over with and go home, so they just sit at their desks and stare into oblivion.  Or go on Facebook.  Or do something less-than-productive.  I'm doing my best here, but I'm not going to lie--the weekend looks pretty good right now, and I'm sort of just waiting for it to hit me.  Thus the blog post.

It could also be that I'm in an office, which, I've discovered, does not work for me.  It simply doesn't.  I go a little crazy.  Thus, today was the best day ever--I spent practically no time by my desk.  Went to a great lunch with Perla and John, our contact at Volunteer Center, and then I met up with Caroline for a meeting with an interested organization.  Most hilarious experience of my life.  I'm on the phone with another organization and I get this frantic text from her telling me that she needs me...  Apparently she wasn't expecting the full on board meeting (6 people just staring at her) that they had ready for her.  It was intimidating, from what I gather, but the girl breezed through the conference and everyone loved her by the end. 

I'm seriously rambling now trying to eat up time while at the same time be the least bit productive.  The main thing that I took away from this week (and, I suppose, all the weeks previous--a cumulative learning process, if you will) is that I do not function well in an office environment.  I get a little sleepy, a little crazy, and it's all just bad news.  But the good news is that I've found a solution--get out of the office.  Site visits, meetings, the works.  I'm not sure that my real, grown-up job will allow me to be as flexible.  I have 3 years to either get over it or find a non-desk job.  Fun stuff.

Ok enough rambling.  Going to go do research on volunteer blogs or something.  22 minutes until the weekend!

P.S. Am insanely jealous of everyone going to see Batman this weekend.

The Menace of Spreadsheets!

I already knew that people hated spreadsheets--I mean, I've heard countless jokes poking fun at their boring facts and figures, their endless lines of cells, and their ability to reduce practically everything to boxes of meaningless numbers.  That and they're boring.  But, man oh man, I did not know how intense they were.  I always thought that people exaggerated how much time they consumed, how much organization and management they required, but I was oh so very wrong.

This week we've gotten into full swing for outreach and we've been emailing people nonstop, following up with organizations, setting up phone conferences and site visits and profiles... it's been organizational madness.  There are so many different organizations with so many different points of contact, so many different steps to getting them set up on the website and tracking their process, and so many different people that we get shuttled between, it's a wonder we can keep anything straight!  Our outreach tracker document is massive.  Really, really huge.  As in I have to open it up using a different internet client, in case its size causes the program to crash.  It's just a visual reminder of how much hard work we're putting into the site and getting the nonprofit community set up on it.  It can be overwhelming and daunting, but something tells me that once all of those silly little boxes say what they're supposed to say, we'll have a feeling of tremendous accomplishment.  Until then, I'll make sure my face isn't too close to the screen while I frantically scan the cells looking for the next thing that I have to do.  Hopefully I'll be better adjusted by the time I get my next post up next week :)

Conferences, Happy Hours, and the new website!

We just launched the new version of the website, complete with an updated color scheme and layout, so please check it out! Be forewarned though, it's still a bit buggy but we're working on hunting down every last one of 'em.

Last Friday we attended Compasspoint's Nonprofit Day conference, where we spent the morning and afternoon going to breakout sessions and workshops (in the case of us interns plus Suj), tabling (in the case of Shari and Perla, mostly), and talking about GreatNonprofits with people (no pun intended). The Westin St. Francis Hotel is gorgeous, littered with period-style light fixtures and chandeliers, with rooms named after British royalty and ballrooms furnished with giant presentation screens-- having the license to run around a venue like that was a nice perk to the day.

The highlight of the day was the Happy Hour, post-conference. I really wasn't altogether too sure that we'd get many people to show up at all. I handed out flyers during the last breakout session as people left the room but that was the only time that I was able to do so in any systematic fashion, and the posters we'd set up on easels announcing the event hadn't been in super-prominent locations during the day.

When I ran out of flyers, I moved outside the breakout room to the main hallway on the second floor. There was a curious level of chatter and excitement from down the hall, and it took me a moment to realize that it was coming from the Happy Hour. So I stood there, holding a giant plastic bin to collect nametags and evaluation forms (the duty we'd been charged with as Compasspoint volunteers), with another one at my feet, and watched in amazement as people not only hurried towards the Essex Room, but came back out of it, cheeks flushed and glasses of Solaris wine in hand. The room was overflowing!

Perla came running down the hall. "We need all the students in there, now!"

I scrambled.

Needless to say, the Happy Hour exceeded all of our expectations. Looks like college students aren't the only ones attracted by free food and drink!

Signing off,
Erin

Out on the town...

After a week and a half of scurrying around an office sorting out organizations, searching for bugs, and getting comfortable with the website, we finally took the stage today! This morning we went to a monthly Thrive membership meeting (a network of nonprofits in San Mateo County) and met with different heads of organizations to talk about GreatNonprofits. The morning started off a little rough... my empty stomach hastily filled with green tea was not so happy making the commute from the city to San Mateo... but everything started falling into place once we bustled into the conference room.

I loved watching everyone react to our site: How much do we have to pay? Nothing. And we can advertise our organization with your website space? Yup. And you will set up the profile with me and help organize reviews? Uh huh. (The pause....) Really? Absolutely.

After we showed people through our site and swapped business cards to set up future phone calls, we were able to hear Bill Somerville speak to the members. I don't even know how to frame how fantastic he was or what a forceful energy he brought to the room. He is the President and Founder of the Philanthropic Ventures Foundation and had the head honchos of these amazing nonprofits wrapped around his little finger. We learned about the value of instant grants, the importance of innovation in grant proposals, and why it is necessary to take risks with people you trust. I am currently perusing Amazon and Borders.com to find a copy of his book-- call me an easy (overeager..) audience, but he honestly has me hooked!

Okay enough for now but I'll check in later-- we are going to the Compasspoint Nonprofit Day conference tomorrow and are hosting a happy hour afterwards at the Westin Hotel. Stories to come, for sure...

Bug Hunting

It's not as interesting as it sounds.  There was no safari for exotic insects, no hunting down giant spiders.  I probably would not have been ok with that.  Today there was just a lot of random clicking to check the new GNP website with its new pretty layout and color scheme (active very, very soon).  We played around, tested the links, posted bogus reviews and made up nonprofits--and it was actually a work assigned task.  But the website will be all the better for it.  Today I spent over an hour on the new site, just kind of poking around and reporting broken links or glitches.  I guess a lot can go wrong with a website...  But that's what the intern team is here to do--to help GNP be its best and to help make sure that everyone and anyone has access to the site and its resources.  There was a lot of work that went into this revamping, so people once it's up and running there's no excuse to not post your experiences!

Ok that's all for now--I'll check back in sometime next week!

The Adventure Begins...

Hello! Welcome to the Great Nonprofits blog. We, the interns, will chronicle our experiences this summer in reaching out to nonprofits in the Bay area and Washington, D.C.