About the Nerdery Overnight Website Challenge
When it comes to websites and technology that can improve outreach and increase donations, many nonprofits are lagging far behind. Thus was born The Nerdery Overnight Website Challenge.
Beginning the morning of March 20, 2010 and concluding the next day, The Nerdery Overnight Website Challenge will again provide a fun forum to highlight creative ways for nonprofits to strategically use web technology to accomplish their missions.
- 7:00 a.m. — Registration, Bruegger’s Bagels, Peace Coffee and Red Bull served, set up work stations. Volunteers: You are welcome to come as early as 6:30 am to set up; please be there by at least 8:00. Nonprofits: Please arrive by 7:30 to check in; at 8 you’ll meet with branding, interactive, and design experts from event sponsors LaBreche.
- 8:45 a.m. — Welcome, get ready to rumble, announce team assignments
- 9:00 a.m. — Countdown begins. Nonprofits meet their team of volunteers and get to work.
- Noonish — Lunch from Buffalo Wild Wings and Jimmy Johns
- 6:00 p.m. — Dinner from Chipotle
- Midnight — Second dinner from Pizza Luce’
- 6:00 — The most important meal of the day. Meanwhile, judges make the rounds between 6-9 a.m., spending 10 minutes assesing each team’s work.
- 9:00 a.m. — Blastoff. Drawing for fabulous prizes while judges pick a Final Four; each gets 10 minutes to present their work.
- 10:00 a.m. – Winner announced. Good night, and good luck.
The event brings a party atmosphere, friendly competition, reality show flair, and most importantly, a sense of immediacy to the concept of in-kind philanthropy in our local web development community. We’ve learned that it’s OK to lock a small army of web nerds in a room with a bunch of nonprofits and what seemed like a lifetime supply of caffeine.
Nonprofits are selected based on the case they make for themselves – and their web needs, as stated in their application. Selection judges also consider online testimonials posted on behalf of nonprofits.
Teams
Each team has 9-10 professionals donating their time and talent for a solid day and night, so each nonprofit is getting more than 200 hours of pro bono work. Who are these people? Check out the team pages.
In the Dark Until the Light of Day
Nonprofit reps will not meet their development team – or even know who they are – until they meet on event day. They’ll have the following 24 hours to get acquainted and get creative.
Being Green
For the 2010 Overnight Website Challenge, we place a new emphasis on environmental issues. In addition to discovering ways to make our event “greener” during its 24-hour duration, we also ask nonprofits and web developers to work together toward building websites that make a concerted effort toward helping organizations work greener while fostering that same spirit among their constituents – this in addition to finding ways work smarter and move their mission further forward through interactive technology. We’re encouraging teams and nonprofits to strategically add functionality and messaging that encourages ecologically responsible advocacy and action – this kind of goes hand-in-hand with using the web to work smarter.
We also took green inspiration from the one nonprofit (Rural Renewal Energy Alliance) that qualified early for the next Challenge by virtue of their winning the Social Entrepreneur’s Cup:
Event Timeline
- December 4: Registration open
- January 8: Applications due from nonprofits
- January 18: Applications due from volunteers/teams; Volunteer team selections announced
- February 1: Nonprofit selections announced
- February 25: Pre-event mixer at Benchmark Learning
- March 20-21, 2010: Nerdery Overnight Website Challenge (9 a.m Saturday – 9 a.m. Sunday)
Location
Continuing Education Conference Center, U of M St. Paul Campus
Sponsors
Special thanks to 2008, 2009 and 2010 sponsors Benchmark Learning, LaBreche, and Reliacloud for their support of The Nerdery Overnight Website Challenge. Big thanks as well to in-kind sponsors Arthouse, Bruegger’s, Buffalo Wild Wings, Chipotle, Cub in Minnetonka, Flashbelt, GitHub, Jimmy Johns, Kowalski’s, Peace Coffee, Pizza Luce, Red Bull and Unwind Within.
A Brief History (to be repeated)
In just the first two years of this annual event, volunteer web pros have donated more than 5,000 hours of professional services to 23 nonprofits – with a real-world market value of more than $500,000. We consider this a good start, but we’ve only just begun. Last year, 120 volunteers pulled all-nighters helping nonprofits they’d only just met. And then we crashed. Hard.
About The Nerdery
A division of Sierra Bravo Corporation, Nerdery Interactive Labs (The Nerdery) has partnered with more than 100 ad, design and marketing agencies nationwide to execute their clients’ web projects, including social media, mobile and Web 2.0 applications. We developed Fallon’s vision for Skimmer, a lifestreaming app pooling users’ social media content and winner of a 2009 Cannes Golden Lion. Also in 2009 we won the PhizzPop Design Challenge at SXSW Interactive by developing Zeus Jones’s Usemore idea, an application for living green. We created the Overnight Website Challenge, a 24-hour community event pairing volunteer programmers with nonprofits to build better websites. Sierra Bravo is an Inc. 5000 company and a Biz Journal Fast 50 company (2008 and 2009) – both leading benchmarks for fast-growing privately owned companies. The Nerdery is a real place just outside Minneapolis where about 90 people draw little distinction between work and play.
