Craigslist Boot Camp Photos August 23, 2006 By Steve Fafel

Van Jones speaks about the trials of starting and building a nonprofit. He's one of the best speakers I've seen in a long time, and I really love the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights. He's done so much toward improving the prison justice system, and has advanced the cause of human rights in doing so. We both used to advise the human rights organization Witness, back in the day.

Some lucky winners of GiftWorks 2006...

...more lucky winners.

Craigslist Nonprofit Boot Camp August 21, 2006 By Steve Fafel

Saturday was an amazing day, from the inspirational Van Jones in his morning keynote, to the fantastic attendees full of exceitement and enthusiasm. We're thrilled to have underwritten the event.

i led a lunchtime discussion about sustainability and socially responsible practices for nonprofits, joined by Mal Warwick and Green Mary.

To recap:

• sustainability starts with you--take care of yoruself first. That means...
• build your sustainbility into your business model, which means
• allocate funds for healthcare, market-rate salary, and retirement.

Don't feel you should be philanthropic in the context of your sustainability--what I mean is don't sacrifice your personal sustainability for anything. You can't do everything if you're flat on your back! Running for the plane...see you all soon.

Craigslist Foundation Nonprofit Boot Camp Today! August 19, 2006 By Steve Fafel

There are 8 of us here from Mission Research, and we're about to hop in the car and head over to Berkeley. I'm particularly excited about this event because I'm moderating a talk over lunch with Mal Warwick, who is one of our advisors, a great fundraising author and the Chair of the Social Venture Network, and Green Mary (greenmary.com), a very cool green activist and community leader.

But the keynote in the morning is going to be particularly cool--Van Jones of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights. I've known him for about 6 years, since we were both advisors to a human rights organization, and since then we've run into each other maybe a dozen times. This is the first time I'll hear him speak, and I'm sure it's going to be great. He produced a film called Books not Bars, which exposes the California penal system for what it is--a costly, ineffective, brutal, dehumanizing prison system. If we only invested more in education; it costs $8,000 per year to educate a kid, but $32,000 a year to incarcerate him. Check out Van Jones and the EBCHR.

nptech | van jones | human rights

GiftWorks Volunteers is Launched! August 17, 2006 By Steve Fafel

6 months later, we're ready! GiftWorks Volunteers is now available at MissionResearch.com. You can turn donors into volunteers easily, track hours worked, jobs, and a lot more. The cool thing is the matching of jobs and volunteers based on skills and availability, and the ability to create Volunteers smartlists and reports. Lots of cool stuff--go check it out and let us know what you think!

And congratulations to the team--especially Steve and Jon, who both cranked hard to make this happen. Ok, back to work now. I'm stuck in a hotel in Burlingame, working on my Craigslist Foundation Boot Camp speech...

giftworks | nptech | nonprofit | volunteer | software |

GiftWorks Volunteers Release Candidate Now with Early Customers August 15, 2006 By Steve Fafel

We're rolling out GiftWorks Update 4 and GiftWorks Volunteers tomorrow morning to a few more customers. It's pretty exciting--we've gone through 6 months of design, development, redesign, testing, retesting, and training, and it's time to get it out the door. Thanks for your patience, and thanks to all the beta testers!

Besides making it easy to manage jobs and volunteers, GiftWorks Volunteers represents a sea change in the nonprofit software industry, and I think our competitors know it. This is the first add-on for the GiftWorks platform, and the precursor to this year's SDK (software development kit). The SDK makes it easy for other software companies to build software for the Giftworks platform, which will give our customers a lot of options for expanding functionality. And our software partners get to market their software to our thousands of customers, so it works out for everyone.

We have more great news on the way, but I think for now I'm going to get back to spreading the word about this very simple way of managing volunteers, hours, jobs, and a lot more. Some days just feel great!

giftworks | nptech | nonprofit | volunteers | software |

GiftWorks Volunteers Ships Monday! August 10, 2006 By Steve Fafel

Steve and the dev test team are putting the final wraps on the product, and Chris is tying up loose ends. it's been a long process, but we think we've developed a solid add-on to GiftWorks. You can create volunteer profiles for donors, create jobs, and match volunteers to jobs based on skills and availability. There's a bunch of reports, SmartLists, etc, and we think you'll really like it.

If you're a developer, check out DaveWeaver.Net/mission to learn a bit about the add-on architecture. We've talked about an SDK for some time now--what do you think? Do you want to cuild custom add-ons for GiftWorks customers? Let me know in the comments.

For everyone else, thanks for your patience. We're looking forward to serving you--our mission is to support your mission.

nptech  nonprofit  volunteers  software  nonprofit  npo  blackbaud  giftworks