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KIPP NYC is an organization focused on results and results it has shown. Over its lifetime, it can consistently grown to educate more students from low-income families and give them a true opportunity to seek higher education. Their programs have extended from kindergarten to college prep, all supported by a dedicated staff of dynamic teachers. These programs have helped 95% of students score at or higher than the state average in math, 93% of students to finish high school, and 86% of graduates go to college. In December, PICnet launched a brand new website for the organization, encasing information on various programs, a professional design, and multimedia on staff and students. It consolidated information from several websites on different programs onto one universal and streamlined site. Some key components of the project:
KIPP NYC is on track to having 50% of their graduates finish college in 6 years in the next two years. The organization’s goal is to strengthen and expand their programs so that 75% of their graduates complete their college degree, compared to national average of 10% for low-income communities. If you would like to learn more or support these students and teachers in their endeavor, please visit them on the web at http://www.kippnyc.org/. At PICnet, once we help a client launch a new site, we make sure we stick around and keep in touch to help with any follow up and enhancements after a few months of usage. We’re always here to help with little fixes, tweaks or updates, and that’s just what we did recently with the Latin America Working Group, whose Soapbox site we launched earlier this year. Once the site was up and running, LAWG wanted to highlight their blog better and allow for commenting on posts from site visitors. Our team worked with them to craft a low-impact strategy by implementing the following low-hanging fruit: 1) creating a new image button on the right side of the homepage called “Read our Blog” with a direct link to the blog Easy fixes, more success for the client = happy PICnet! LAWG brings U.S. civil society groups and citizens together to influence U.S. policy to promote peace and justice in Latin America. Since 1983, we’ve been opening doors for Latin American human rights activists to speak truth to power in Washington, DC. Learn more about LAWG at http://www.lawg.org.
When they came to us asking if we could help create an individual home on the internet for each and every one of these Discovery Shops, we had just one question: When do we start? By leveraging the power of Non-Profit Soapbox and crafting a common template for consistent branding across the network, we built 40 sites to promote each individual shop – all efficiently and easily for not much more than the cost of a single site. No fuss. No muss. Just a high quality network of easy to manage sites to further an important mission. But don’t take our word for it. Hear it straight from Steven Wirt, Director of Online and Internal Communications for the American Cancer Society of California: “I’ve been very impressed and pleased with Non-Profit Soapbox. Wrangling 40 web sites has been a seamless, pain-free experience.”
Every year on May 1st, CCW and AFT promote recognition of Worthy Wage Day by organizing a variety of activities to recognize and honor the dedication of early childhood educators and staff and to draw attention to their low wages and minimal benefits. This national day of awareness is just one of the many lasting effects of the Worthy Wage Campaign that CCW organized from 1991-1999.
But not every child and their family starts a new school year with ease- and that’s where The GO Project comes in. Many children in Lower Manhattan public schools are first or second generation Americans with parents who speak little to no English, their families are struggling financially, and they don’t have the resources to fully benefit from the public school system. The GO Project has been addressing the intellectual, social and emotional needs of children attending public elementary schools in lower Manhattan and their families since 1968. Their support services and programs help over 300 struggling elementary school children each year build the confidence and skills they need to realize their potential and succeed at school, at home and in life. I attended my first Community Technology and Digital Opportunity Meetup in San Francisco on July 20th and left feeling inspired about the potential of using digital media to express the realities, triumphs and work of my clients. The purpose of this meetup is to share the work of various nonprofits around the Bay Area who provide technology access and programming to the local community through either computer labs or innovative digital literacy curricula. The week’s topic “Bayview Hunter’s Point Center for Art and Technology and Digital Storytelling!” was hosted by the titled organization, BAYCAT, and also featured a presentation by Jen Nowicki from Creative Narrations. Jen first defined what digital storytelling is: it’s a vignette told in the first person and made up of personal images and text in a video format. Her organization helps nonprofits and education institutions empower their constituents’ voices by training them to develop their own digital story. From what I saw, their process is focused, impacting and cathartic for many of the individuals they serve. They teach the elements of how to tell a story and move their students through four stages of developing their work: Preparation, Production, Publishing and Promotion. The final stage is important to the recognition and ownership of the work, and helps ensure that the community hears the story. For resources on how to create your own digital story, you can go to Stories for Change. Here is one of the highlighted videos: BAYCAT is an organization that educates the underserved communities of Bayview and Hunter’s Point on various media production techniques, and then employs some of their graduates to fulfill corporate and other nonprofit media needs. This cycle from student to professional creates an incredible incentive for the students and their families to continue supporting their talents. Many of the production pieces serve as public service messages to the student’s community, so they become change agents against drugs and violence. Here is a very creative and funny one done by a teenager: I would love to see some of my clients start to utilize these resources. I know that the web development process is quite an undertaking in itself, but starting to incorporate video to tell stories would be a great 6 month follow up to keep web content fresh. It would also be a great case for strategic partnerships among nonprofits.
One of the most critical pieces to working more efficiently is better forecasting, and we’re taking a stab at a powerful tool called FogBugz to help us better track tasks as well as to more accurately predict completion dates. FogBugz 6.0 includes an amazing feature called Evidence-Based Scheduling (EBS), which our project management department is drooling over. Here’s the scenario to help understand why PICnetters are excited about EBS: Imagine a reality where project managers and developers can agree on the release schedule of a project based on past performance data, predictive complexity data, and corporate calendars. Imagine a meeting where project managers can leave a scheduling meeting saying, “I know with X% probability that this project will launch on time”, and developers can leave saying, “man, it feels great to not have to make guesstimates that are force fit into PM’s schedules”. As the FogBugz site says:
From what we’ve seen so far, FogBugz’s EBS functionalities has a good chance of making easy forecasting a reality. We’ll do our best to keep you posted on our experiment with FogBugz, and track our overall response to the effectiveness of EBS in project management. |
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For fifteen years, 
Growth provides an amazing incentive to work smarter. At 12 employees today, PICnet’s growth spurt has reached the point where working longer hours isn’t going to cut it. While I get few hours of sleep each night, PICnetters know that I don’t want to see the company follow down my path. It’s the “do as I say, not as I do” approach to sleep.
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