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!

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.