story and photos by Kim Souza
ksouza@thecitywire.com
More than 35 tech professionals volunteered their expertise and talents to help 10 local nonprofits with website design and functionality at the third annual Northwest Arkansas GiveCamp. The event was held April 24-26 in Rogers at he corporate office of Collective Bias.
Phyl Amerine, co-founder of Startup Junkie in Fayetteville, collaborated with Chris Whittle, director of information technology at Collective Bias, to coordinate this year’s event that was expanded to help three more charities than last year. Amerine said there is so much need from our nonprofit community in Benton and Washington counties and this event can make a big difference which is why she has spearheaded the program since 2013.
She said the corporate support for this weekend-long GiveCamp is essential for its success. The tech professionals this year are from Wal-Mart, Tyson Foods, Northwest Technical Institute, Collective Bias and include several entrepreneurs like Josh Moody, CEO of Overwatch.
Whittle was tasked to coordinate the charities who applied to the program with the tech teams who could best deliver the desired results. Aside from techies, a few wordsmiths are also volunteering their time to help craft content messages for the new or improved websites.
Jamie Smith, self-employed blogger, content provider and freelancer with The City Wire, is one of the wordsmiths volunteering at GiveCamp. Smith said it usually takes four to six weeks to build a website, depending on the scope, but these teams or getting it done in a weekend.
“It’s been a bit of a juggling match. I have had tech volunteers pull out at the last minute but others have stepped up and it looks like we have just enough to get the jobs done,” Whittle said.
As of Saturday morning, Whittle told The City Wire the tech teams were back it at after working past 11 p.m. on Friday evening. He said everything was moving smooth and there was still plenty of work to finish before GiveCamp concluded at 4 p.m. on Sunday (April 26).
Angie Pratt, founder of Soldiers on Service Dogs, was teamed with Chaz Ross of Wal-Mart and Chad Kieffer and Sheila Czech, faculty members at NTI who also recruited the help of a few students to the project. Pratt said her nonprofit pairs free service dogs with military veterans suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome or Traumatic Brain Injury. She said there are an estimated 840 veterans in Benton and Washington counties who could benefit for service dogs.
“We have a waiting list of 75 veterans,” Pratt said. “We have 30 dogs in service and 13 other puppies in training.”
Pratt said the charity has a website, but she is hoping the team of techies she’s been paired with can overhaul and ramp up the site so it’s more conducive for the multifunctional needs of the operation. The site needs to be able to accept applications on the procurement end from puppy donations and dog fostering as well as seeking donations.
She hopes that participating in GiveCamp will not only bring more awareness to the charity but also help facilitate the day-to-day operations by having a more comprehensive website that reduces the paper applications and cumbersome back-office operations.
Whittle said most of the charities in this year’s GiveCamp either need a new website or major overhauls to their existing sites. For instance, Western Arkansas Ballet has a functioning website but it’s not mobile friendly. He said that team will tweak the nonprofit’s website design so users can access it with their mobile phones.
“This day and time websites have to mobile friendly, otherwise they are missing a major part of the market,” Whittle said.
For charities like the Yvonne Richardson Center in Fayetteville, GiveCamp will build a new website over the 30-hour period. This charity has not had their own site, which is hard to believe, but they were part of the Access Fayetteville site. The Yvonne Richardson Center works with area youth on recreational and educational needs, operating a gymnasium linked with city’s parks and recreation division.
Josh Moody, CEO of Overwatch, was on the team tasked with building the new site for the Yvonne Richardson Center. Moody said he built the original website for his company Overwatch and also has some design skills he hopes to lend to the team.
“It feels good to give back to charities in this region that have been so supportive of my company in recent years,” he said.
While it’s hard to quantify the value that will come out of the 2015 NWA GIveCamp, Whittle said the quality IT services that these 10 charities are getting would cost upwards of $100 per hour.
Extrapolating that assessment on a conservative basis the weekend GiveCamp value is more than $100,000 for just the tech labor. Whittle said the intangibles likely add thousands more because this added technology can allow charities to run more efficiently.
“Many of them could never pay for the service they are getting here. If they could it would come at the expense of their ability to help others,” he added.
Whittle and Amerine like to think of it this way: Perhaps participating in GiveCamp could mean 500 more children and adults get the services they need because these 10 charities will have functioning tech capabilities that allow them to maximum their efforts on the ground.
The 10 nonprofits participating in this year’s NWA GiveCamp were:
• Rosco P. Coal Train's Community Outreach
• Arkansas Coalition of Marshallese
• Yvonne Richardson Community Center
• Camp Alliance Inc
• Marshallese Educational Initiative
• Western Arkansas Ballet
• Arkansas Counseling Association (ArCA)
• Soldier on Service Dogs
• The Cisneros Center for New Americans