The Haas Foundation :: Seattle Net Tuesday Notes

[Brian Glanz]

Below are my notes from one of five presentations at August's Seattle Net Tuesday. Notes from each presentation are a separate blog entry. Sessions were limited to five minutes, so I followed up with presenters as needed. -- Brian Glanz

The Saul and Dayee G. Haas Foundation
presentation by Volunteer Michele Fugiel

The Haas Foundation improves secondary education for those in need, involving roughly 600 secondary schools in Washington State.

They've created online tools of interest to other non-profits, both as a great example of what's generally possible for a modernizing organization, and possibly per the individual tools themselves. These include:

• Online forms used by grant recipients to submit annual reports. The forms include room to enter human interest stories that have come in handy later.
• A means of raising funds online, for example an obvious button to click to make a donation from the foundation's Web site.
• A volunteering log. Volunteers perform many tasks for Haas Foundation, especially media related, and volunteers are not only from Seattle. The foundation receives credit for every hour volunteered, and this helps with tracking and also managing volunteered work, performed asynchronously.

Haas does not always create tools from scratch. In a great example of coordinating their online tools, other readily available online tools, and volunteer efforts, volunteers used Lulu to publish a collection of success stories which grant recipients had entered into the online annual report form. The finished publication was volunteer-edited and sent as a thank-you to donors of a certain amount.

The Haas Foundation doesn't yet have all the answers. Michele expressed their general need for coordinating online tools for volunteers with a better way volunteers can connect to form a community online. Again, volunteers are not all in Seattle. They have used SharePoint, but they have found SharePoint is difficult to maintain over time, from a usability standpoint.

As the presentation sessions were brief, our immediate group did not have an opportunity to discuss potential solutions. Groups of five or so attendees shifted between the presentations, so if other groups were able to discuss solutions for the Haas Foundation or if anyone has an idea now, please feel free to post here or contact the Haas Foundation.
My instincts tend toward something like PBwiki for collaborative working with community building on the side. It's possible something more targeted toward the social side, like Ning as Seattle Net Tuesday has started using, would be a better glue for Haas Foundation volunteers.

I'm certain the Haas Foundation would be happy to hear more suggestions. Tell them Michele Fugiel and Seattle Net Tuesday sent you!

Brian Glanz