By the time I got to Berkeley, found a parking spot (and paid for that parking spot), I had missed the first keynote by Arianna Huffington and the first workshop session. I was there in time for the second keynote, which was Randi Zuckerberg from Facebook. Randi is a great speaker and she spoke about Facebook pages and other support for non-profits. Her talk was a little bland, and I wish it had been more about what Facebook had planned for the future.
After lunch, the two options were a social media workshop from Susan Gordon (Causes) and Beth Kanter (non-profit social media extradonaire) and a workshop on volunteer engagement with Jennifer Bennet from Volunteer Match and Ami from Idealist.org. It was great because instead of doing a long presentation, they mostly focused on Q&A from the folks there. Primary themes:
- Today's volunteers are different. Many are skilled and want to use those skills in their volunteer work (they want to do more than just stuff envelopes), and they are less interested in working guild style environment and more interested in volunteering with friends and families.
- There are countless ways to get people involved in volunteering for yur organization -- contact professional people and the worst they can say is no.
- Treat volunteers like you would employees, especially if they are core to your organization's success. Have a volunteer handbook that lays out what is expected of them. Communicate with them about schedules, expectations, etc.
- If you're a volunteer, you need to be proactive. You can't just post a profile and wait to be contacted. If there is an organization that you're really interested in working for, contact them and explain what you can bring to the table. If you're interested in international volunteerism or volunteer ("tourism"), go and do it. If you have the financial resources, go to the country and research what you want to do.
After the break, the final workshop session of the day was the one for All for Good. It was definitely the most star-studded workshop of the day. Jonathan Greenblatt, from UCLA who now chairs Our Good Works - the non-profit which will govern allforgood.org, led the panel. Adam Sah is the tech guy from Google who built allforgood.org as his 20% project. The final person on the panel was Susan Nesbitt, who is Director of Online Programs for the Craigslist Foundation. Adam ran through a demo of the platform and what went in to the development.
The really great thing about the allforgood.org platform is that they really don't want people to come to the allforgood.org site. They built the platform based on the use of widgets / gadgets. The main plan of all for good is to a) aggregate volunteer opportunities from other sites (idealist.org, volunteermatch.org) and b) have people install widgets / gadgets on their pages which will list the volunteer opportunities. (Huffington Post already has a gadget on their home page for volunteer opportunities in New York.) They really do want to create a tool that allows volunteers to connect with opportunities.
The final session was an all-star panel led by Michael Krasny. I stayed for the first few minutes but I knew I couldn't sit and then sit and drive home. The ushers in the theatre were insistent about nobody standing in the aisles, which didn't leave me with many options.
Bootcamp links:
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