What Happened at Speed Geek?

For all of those you who joined us for Speed Geek (as well as those who didn’t!), we wanted to follow up with a quick recap. Speed Geek was a blast, complete with cowbell, and the great feedback we’ve received has us thinking we shouldn’t wait too long before planning another event. If you don’t know what a Speed Geek is, here’s the gist: imagine a bunch of smarty pants showing off new tools, applications, and tricks (in our case, for nonprofits) in five minutes or less. It’s like speed dating, but for nerds.

One more big shout out to our event sponsors: Impact Hub Seattle, North Coast Brewing Company, Georgetown Brewing Company, and Brenthaven Bags. You guys are swell! And finally, here’s the lowdown on all of the Speed Geek presentations, in case you saw something you wanted to follow up on, but weren’t sure who the presenter was.

501 Commons – Skype for Business is also great for nonprofits! Graham Ford from 501 Commons showed us around the app and talked about the nonprofit use case.

Bigger Boat Consulting – Brad Struss showcased Homekeeper, a Salesforce tool his shop built for affordable housing orgs, which allows staff to manage their day-to-day workflow and measure and compare performance.

Exponent Partners – Eric Magnuson gave us a tour of an ultra-user-friendly class management platform that his company built for Springboard Collaborative on top of Salesforce with a user interface technology called Skuid.

Forum One – Jenn Johnson and Andy Hieb presented an approach to mapping for non-profits, featuring a Leaflet mapping library project they recently completed for the Gates Foundation.

Fuse IQ – Joel Meyers showed off an awesome custom Drupal search mechanism (leveraging the Apache Solr search utility) which he and his team created for over 4,400 species of seafood for FishChoice.

Jazkarta – Cris Ewing explained the differences between search, browse, and filtering user interfaces and demonstrated faceted search, which is a powerful and user-friendly approach in many situations.

Karass Creative – Ariel Martin showcased an online video her company produced for TedX Rainier – TedX Rainier had a small budget but a big idea and Karass Creative brought the creative energy and technical expertise to develop a marketing asset that worked across channels.

MRW Web Design – Mark Root-Wiley shared Feature a Page Widget, a simple but powerful open source contribution that he designed after seeing a need in his client base and which has now been used by 9,000+ websites.

Percolator Consulting – Kindra Ramos from Washington Trails Association demonstrated how her organization uses Percolator’s StepUp app to track and analyze supporter engagement.

See Your Impact – Dylan Holmes gave a tour of their mobile-first technology which makes it easy for board members and other organization champions to recruit attendees/donors, track their relationships, and steward participants post-campaign.

ThinkShout – Lev Tsypin showed off RedHen Raiser, great for quickly launching peer-to-peer fundraising campaigns (also referred to as crowd fundraising, team fundraising, or viral fundraising campaigns).