Sparked Blog

We just came across this nice blog post from Mazarine Treyz who posted a challenge on Sparked on behalf of the Austin Civic Orchestra. Her challenge involved creating a new logo (some of the variations pictured here). As part of this blog post, Mazarine writes up a list of tips for getting the most out of Sparked – and we couldn’t have said it better ourselves. Here’s her list:

Top tips for getting the most out of Sparked.com,

• Make it funny,
• Make it specific,
• Make it manageable.
• It’s important to always be gracious and say thank you and give awards, just like you learned in Managing Volunteers 101.

This post is part of an ongoing series that features real results from Sparked, the microvolunteering network. Learn more about Sparked here.

*******

What a cool challenge. This one was posted by Gladys from HW Eggers Middle school. This is one of the schools that our awesome partner, DonorsChoose, onboarded over the past several weeks. Gladys asked for volunteers to help her build up a reading list for young girls featuring strong female leads.

Eight volunteers came up with a ton of suggestions – based on personal experience and research.

Great challenge result. Check it out here: http://www.sparked.com/ask/You-Go-Girl

This post is part of an ongoing series that features real results from Sparked, the microvolunteering network. Learn more about Sparked here.

*******

The Nonprofit: Ravenswood Family Health Center is a federally qualified health clinic that operates in East Palo Alto. The clinic aims to provide the best quality, culturally competent primary and preventive health care that it can to their patients, irrespective of ability to pay.

The Challenge: Design a logo for the Ravenswood Garden Project!

The Result: What makes this challenge particularly awesome and blog-worthy is the microvolunteer’s persistence in giving the nonprofit exactly what they wanted. Katherine S. goes way way WAY out of her way to deliver. Just take a look at all the subtle variations she tried out for Ravenswood below.

Final Design

THIS is exactly what those awards of excellence are for! Those contributions that go beyond the necessary. Not to mention that the challenge itself was quite active, with other enthusiastic volunteers plugging in a total of 8 more designs for Ravenswood to choose from. While Katherine came up with the final look, the extent to which she goes to satisfy the nonprofit is admirable. We love having such dedicated microvolunteers. We love Katherine S.

This post is part of an ongoing series that features real results from Sparked, the microvolunteering network. Learn more about Sparked here.

*******

The Nonprofit: Women Aloud Videoblogging for Empowerment a.k.a WAVE India, a videoblogging platform for the voices of socially aware young women in India. Its founders began the nonprofit out of a need to encourage young Indian women to analyze the problems of their communities so that they can become more effective leaders in society.

The Challenge: We need help analyzing our video views and website analytics!

The Result: For any online activist initiative that focuses on being heard, understanding your web statistics ranks as a top priority. For WAVE, with its collection of around 200 videos, these analytics were crucial to strategizing improvements to their project and planning its future. While they had access to various tools such as Tubemogul, Google and Cpanel Analytics, they had none of the professional expertise needed to interpret the data. Enter microvolunteer Irina I. from Barclays-Clearlybusiness. She not only elaborately outlines how to understand an important metric known as the bounce rate, but also provides her own insights into the collected data. Realizing the value of continuing this data interpretation, WAVE then sought to find someone to fulfill this purpose. Here Irina assisted further by explaining the type of position that fits the bill, and what to look for in potential candidates.

The expertise that microvolunteers are able to offer continually impresses me, and the nonprofits no doubt! Thank you Irina I. for your wonderful advice.

This post is part of an ongoing series that features real results from Sparked, the microvolunteering network. Learn more about Sparked here.

*******

The nonprofit: Glenwood Sunday Market.

The challenge: Create a poster for the Squash festival.

The result: Wow! This challenge isn’t over yet, but I came across it and loved the two designs submitted so far so much – that I wanted to share them here with you. Also saw some great collaboration from a non-designer, still awake at 3am, who suggested using the phrase “Come and Meet Sassquash”… ha ha. And then Genie D. incorporated the phrase into her awesome poster. See for yourself:

And then another great submission from Lesley G.

This post is part of an ongoing series that features real results from Sparked, the microvolunteering network. Learn more about Sparked here.

*******

The nonprofit: Based in the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania area, Cradles to Crayons works to make sure all children up to age 12 living in homeless and low-income situations have the essentials they need to feel safe, warm, ready to learn, and valued.

The challenge: Research poverty statistics for Philadelphia and the surrounding area.

The result: Joseph from Cradles to Crayons says that having up-to-date poverty statistics is extremely important in attracting donors as well as conveying impact, but they aren’t always easy to get ahold of.  ”We currently have some research on Philadelphia but struggle to find and compile poverty statistics for the surrounding counties,” says Joseph, who posted the collection of accurate statistics as a research challenge on Sparked.

Microvolunteers Maxine, Chandni, Michael, and Paola responded to the call, compiling a list of relevant statistics that Joseph calls amazing. ”We have already implemented them into our daily grant writing and are hoping for some success,” he says in his thank-you message to volunteers, adding that compelling statistics, “go a LONG way in helping us to serve more children in need.”

Learn more about Cradles to Crayons on their website, or favorite them on Sparked to be notified of any future challenges they post.

(Photo courtesy of Cradles to Crayons)

This post is part of an ongoing series that features real results from Sparked, the microvolunteering network. Learn more about Sparked here.

*******

The nonprofit: Seeking to broaden awareness and foster positive attitudes regarding people with Down Syndrome, The Down Syndrome Guild of Greater Kansas City provides support and resources for individuals with Down syndrome and their families.

The challenge: Design the invitation for our 2011 Holiday Party.

The result: In the hopes of finding a truly unique design for her organization’s holiday party invitation, Laura from the Down Syndrome Guild posted a challenge to Sparked, and was rewarded with not one, but several design options submitted by two dedicated microvolunteers, Jennifer B. and Jed H.

Jennifer and Jed created designs that are sure to please the over 1,000 invitees for this year’s holiday party, and best of all — they were free to DSG. Check ‘em out:

This post is part of an ongoing series that features real results from Sparked, the microvolunteering network. Learn more about Sparked here.

*******

The nonprofit: African NGO Ofyeneda works to help students in underserved Kenyan communities gain access to secondary and tertiary education by combatting the factors that fuel devastatingly-high dropout rates.

The challenge: Help us turn off the commenting feature on our WordPress-hosted website.

The result: ”Use WordPress” is one of the most common pieces of advice dolled out to Sparked nonprofits by tech-savvy volunteers. And it’s easy to see why: for small nonprofits (especially ones with minimal technical capabilities) WordPress is a one-stop shop for turning out a professional-looking website without spending precious funding dollars or tons of time.  Despite it’s ease-of-use, though, there are times when nonprofit WordPress users need to call upon an expert for troubleshooting help, and for Daniel from Ofyeneda, this was one of those times.

Overall, Daniel was happy with his organization’s clean and simple website (http://www.ofyeneda.org/), but there was one aspect he was less than thrilled about: commenting.  Like many WordPress sites, his template had places on every page to leave a publicly-viewable comment, which wouldn’t be such a bad thing if it didn’t make his site look more like a blog than the official website of a poverty-fighting NGO. After attempting to remove commenting himself to no avail, Daniel decided to use Sparked to solve his problem, and posted a request that went straight to our community of good-doing techies, including January W.  Having already won two awards of excellence from other nonprofits for her awesome microvolunteering, January took Daniel’s theme files, and removed the commenting directly — leaving him with the site he was looking for… and no comments in sight.

Read more Nonprofit Success stories here, or sign up for Sparked and post your own.