Wrapping up our year of AmeriCorps VISTA at NPower

This week marks the end of our team’s time at NPower Northwest, and what a year it’s been. From our first meetings at Pre-Service Orientation in Florida through the trials, tribulations and joys of adjusting to our new home in Seattle, this team has been through a lot during the past year. Initially created as a way to bring tech services to small anti-poverty nonprofits, the HandsOn Tech team experienced a range of successes and struggles during this pilot program. From the struggles of bringing together the expectations and goals of many different partners to the success of training over 150 unique nonprofits, we have experienced a year full of change, challenge and in the end a lot of team bonding. In this blog post we thought we would share a few of the numbers from various parts of this past year.

Nonprofit Tech Trainings

• Facilitated 37 different tech trainings with community partners such as Google, Microsoft, Volunteer Administrators Network, Help Attack, Knowledge as Power and many more.
• Trained 224 individuals representing 170 unique nonprofits from the Seattle area on a range of nonprofit tech topics.
• Created 18 Slideshare presentations that were viewed 4,397 times and downloaded 20 times during the past 8 months. Our 3 most popular topics were Choosing a Database [705 views], Social Media Content Curation [575 views] and Free & Low Cost Tools for Nonprofits [499 views]

Tech Assessments & Strategy Maps

• Worked one-on-one with 13 nonprofits in our cohort model to provide technology assessment and strategy maps.
• Provided 3 hands-on trainings on Social Media, Google programs for nonprofits and Websites for nonprofits, with 36 total attendees.

Figuring out the future

Can you guess which one is from 2011 and which one is from 2012?*

As our team transitions into new things, we thought we would each share a bit about what’s coming up:

Abby - This year ended up being not only a chance to improve my tech training skills, but a crash course in online communications & social media, event planning support and much more. I am excited to be taking those skills on with me to a job at 501 Commons where I will join their Community Engagement team and help shepherd next year’s HandsOn Tech VISTAs in year 2 of this project.

Elissa - My work at HandsOn Tech allowed me to strengthen my training and research skills and reinforced my interest in data management. I am thankful for the opportunities I had to talk with the NPower Northwest consultants, attend classes and webinars on nonprofit technology topics, and connect with the Seattle Salesforce Nonprofit Users Group. I am thrilled to report that I just accepted a job with the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation at UW as a data indexer!

Stephen - This year has been a great opportunity to become acquainted with Seattle, learn and work with the nonprofit sector, and teach myself new skills. I’m currently looking at software development positions and perhaps one or two computer science courses at the University of Washington.

Thank you to all the many folks in the nonprofit tech community who have attended our trainings, helped us learn, signed up for our cohort and generally helped us figure out this crazy nonprofit world. We are sure we will see many of you around town in the coming months.

- Abby Nafziger, Elissa Thomas & Stephen Eggers

*Top photo is from our very first day at NPower back in August of 2011 and the bottom was taken just this afternoon (Aug 2012)when we decided to re-create that fateful day