We can honestly say that without The Community Foundation’s support, we would not have gotten very far. Your support has allowed us to focus on the project while you took care of our nonprofit administration. We brought you an idea for a nonprofit startup that we developed during a sushi eating contest and you provided the nonprofit umbrella for us to make it happen which was an amazing feat. Thank you so much – we love you!

We gotta give a huge shout out to the Van Heyst Group who have provided our workspace. Our productivity is directly linked to these fine facilities and for that we are forever grateful. Thank you so much for everything. Looking for office space to rent? They have some available and it is awesome.

Both Rally Software and Amazon have provided key infrastructure components for us to develop and deliver these applications. You have made our process so much easier which is key for a large group of volunteers who are writing and testing code (you know exactly what I mean).

The Boulder Denver New Tech Meetup has been a home base for us and we can’t tell you how much the love has powered us forward. We have pitched our ideas, read your tweets (be nice!), and appreciated all of the feedback and support. Remember, we are just getting started and have much more to do so we hope you will continue to provide this tremendous lifeline to this project.

To our web and logo designers, Christopher Ritter and Chris Freitag, we don’t know how to thank you. You have developed the face of SnapImpact and we are honored to work with you. YOU ROCK!

Our volunteers. So many people. There were so many who helped us to get started and who have supported us over the time taken to get to this point, check out Andrew Hyde’s and Stepan Mazurov’s fabulous photos. Thanks for helping us get this off the ground. We could not have persevered without ya!

Most recently, we have had a kick ass software development crew – Ryan Schneider, Hassan Abdel-Rahman, Neil Simon, Tony Kay, Dave Angulo, Orn Kristjansson, Mark Chance, Eric Telingator, and Sue Uyetake.  They have worked hard slinging code with only mediocre pizza and good beer to sustain them while keeping full time jobs and family happy. You are heroes.

The current rock star business development team includes Nicole Glaros, Josh Clauss, Katrina Florence, Rick Saltzman, Rich Grote, Brett Greene, Dan Hellman, Mark Haeg, Luke Tilsley, Kevin Cloughley, and Phong Le. You slaved away to develop the feature set, build out a PR and marketing plan, and continue to push our project forward (over a few bottles of excellent tequila). Thanks for doing this while keeping bosses and families happy along the way.

Finally, our data partners HandsOn Network and All For Good, are truly the engine of SnapImpact. They provide the data that fuels the volunteering process and we are proud to call them partners.

We are the luckiest startup nonprofit in the world. Thanks to everyone!

But I was actually half lying. It is cool, kinda. But I thought it would be a lot cooler to let everyone decide how it turns out. Like everyone everyone. You know – on the planet. Being totally honest, some of us thought that just keeping it to a bunch of people that showed up on a Tuesday in a building in Boulder smacked of place-ism (and volunteerism). So, because this whole innertubes or webernets (or whatever the kids are calling it) deal is like one big, happy family of zeros and ones, we wanted to give any of our cyber siblings out there a chance to change the world. And it’s so freakin’ easy. We need you to click three times. That’s it.

And did we mention it’s fun? It’s not even fun like when your parents told you you were going to the Hot Air Balloon Festival, leading you to believe you were going to get to ride on a hot air balloon, only to later realize that you would merely be watching as the more privileged people got to fly away while you stood there holding a hot chocolate in the freezing cold – at 4:30 am (I guess we never forget some things). No, it’s actually fun, because it involves critiquing stuff. And who doesn’t like to judge? Voicing your opinion is one of the most fun things you can do, and it’s totally free (unlike dates)!

So what is it exactly? Well, the iVolunteer unit has selected (after careful, meticulous research and composition that took us an entire Saturday) FOUR different logos and brand identities for the iVolunteer program that will help us spread the love of community service as though it were contagious. We need you, fair internet, to guide us in your infinite wisdom toward the proper decision. Here’s how it works: Each logo/brand set has been neatly packaged for speedy consumption (unlike this intro), and includes a primary logo, secondary logo(s), and one example of what an ad might look like to get a feel for the brand (for those among us who take yoga and drink herbal tea). Interpret them however you wish (click the image to see a bigger version), and then go to the survey link at the end of this post to submit your vote. Don’t like what you see? Maybe you can do better. If you would like to take a stab, send your competing submissions to josh AT tuggl DOT com, and they wil be added into the mix immediately. We will not be offended. Without further ado, here are your choices:

IDENTITY A

Like this one? This is Identity A (Original Logo)! Go to the bottom to vote!

IDENTITY B

Like this one? This is Identity B (iBot)! Go to the bottom to vote!

IDENTITY C

Like this one? This is Identity C (Phone Signal)! Go to the bottom to vote!

IDENTITY D

Like this one? This is Identity D (Scribbly)! Go to the bottom to vote!

I know what you’re thinking: Those su-uuuuu-ck. Don’t forget, you can submit your own, but the later you do, the fewer votes you have time to get. So get on it! Or, alternatively, you can be lazy and just vote on one like I’m about to do at the SURVEY SITE: Click me! Click me!

Feel free to leave a comment on the survey site about how much we suck, but be prepared to couple it with how we can suck less.

Thanks, everybody in the whole world! Have a great week, and be sure to check back in a few weeks when we’ll be announcing the winner, or you can just subscribe to this blog’s super-awesome, satisfaction-guaranteed RSS feed to make sure you know when it comes up.

-Josh Clauss, on behalf of the iVolunteer Marketing Mod Squad

This week we flushed out development tasks, got developers access to the files, got briefed on the legal aspect of things and took a look at a new homepage mock. Thanks to Rally for providing space, pizza and beer!

Check out Stepan’s iVolunteer set on Flickr.

(or–What the Hell am I Doing Here?… Seriously.) 

Imagine you’ve just arrived in Boulder. Imagine you’re me, and you’ve just arrived here from (dare I admit it so early on?)– uh yeah, Dallas. You’re loving the mountains, the air (if there were just more of it, please), the coffee shops. And then you kinda luck into hanging with the coolest group of smart, driven, passionate, confident, community-oriented people this town has to offer. Pretty sweet life, huh? 

Oh yeah, except… ahem. You’re unemployed. In this economy. 

The suck-fest news is that you’ve got no income. The good-fest news is that you’ve finally got at least part of the substance to craft an answer to the ever-so-popular-and-not-at-all-annoying “So what do you do?” question. And the “what they do” gig at iVolunteer has all kinds of potential to effect change in how volunteering happens in local communities all over the United States.

Last Tuesday, an impressive group of folks came together at the Van Heyst Group here in Boulder in answer to the call for help with the iVolunteer endeavor. The group split into the geeks and the non-geeks and got to work. Like Obama said in his inaugural speech, “For everywhere we look, there is work to be done.” And damn straight if everyone didn’t get right to it. The non-geeks started knocking around ideas– communications, writing, brainstorming, wondering what the geeks were doing… All great stuff to be part of. 

Although this Boulder newbie may not know in which direction the winds of vocation may blow or what I’m going to be when I grow up, what is for sure is that there is power in surrounding myself with people I want to be like. Regardless, when this caliber of folks comes together to make profound, positive change happen in the world, I want to be part of it.

Hearing that there seem to be some parallels between Startup Weekend and the iVolunteer project got me asking myself some questions:

Why does iVolunteer feel like Startup Weekend?

What can we swipe learn from the Startup Weekend process?

To get insight on the second question, I’m going to go the source and talk with Andrew Hyde, Startup Weekend’s founder and iVolunteer team member. (Check out his post on iVolunteer here: http://andrewhyde.net/ivolunteer-meets-with-a-bang/) I’ll write up my thoughts on that interview soon.

For now, here are my thoughts on the first question: Why does iVolunteer feel like Startup Weekend?

It’s about community.

To steal from David Cohen’s excellent Startup Weened Top 10 post, “Future co-founders will meet, experts will emerge, people will catch the startup bug. This is good for you, and it’s good for your town.” That’s what people have been saying they got from our first Meetup and I can only see that expanding as folks get down to the nitty gritty of getting iVolunteer off the ground.

It’s not about the Benjamins.

Although the air may feel entrepreneurially-enriched, participating in a Startup Weekend isn’t likely to make you wealthy. Neither will working on a guerrilla nonprofit startup. Realizing that nobody is going to make any money with this is actually pretty refreshing. Or, Nicole Glaros put it so aptly, “we don’t need no stinkin’ business model.”

“You decide your level of involvement.”

Structurally, the two endeavors have some common elements. I guess there’s a bit of Project Mayhem built into both. The projects are somewhat loosely defined at the start, then people self-organize into groups who then take on functional areas and tasks they find interesting. Nobody is in charge and people are free to take on as much or as little as they like.

This Tuesday (Feb 3rd), the iVolunteer crew will be giving an update at the Boulder Denver New Tech Meetup. Show your support for the project and see the awesome startup community first hand. Note that our next working session will be on Tuesday (Feb 10th) at Rally Software. More details to come.