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Quote of the Week:

One of my other jobs...

...is helping to run a scholarship fund dedicated to helping out environmentally-minded undergrad students. Started up in honor of my late father, the David L. Bucknam Memorial Scholarship Fund is finally on Twitter, Facebook, etc. and you should become a follower/fan/supporter as soon as humanly possible. You know, if you care about the earth, or anything. Which I KNOW you do--which is why I digress from my usual design ramblings here to mention it.

We're holding our fifth annual fund-raiser on September 13th, up at Alderfer-Three Sisters Park near Evergreen, by the way. It's a lot of fun. You can hike or bike around and not even know you're supporting the education of dedicated environmental scientists while you're wolfing down an amazing burger, or brownie, or Breckenridge Brewery Avalanche Ale (thanks, Tebo!). All you have to know is if you come, you'll have a great time.

Go here for more info.

Labels: cycling, fundraising, nonprofits, social networking, twitter

posted at 10:10 PM Leave your comments here: 0 comments

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2.05.2009

A Cause Close to my Heart

I first supported Project Angel Heart years ago, helping Ellen create some pieces for their fundraising events. And for 15 years, the Colorado chapter of the AIGA has been putting their heart and soul into supporting this worthwhile effort. I've bid on art at the auctions in years' past, and it's all great stuff! Come on by Feb. 11th and check it out. Deets are below:

AIGA Colorado Presents: The 15th Annual Heart Art Auction

When: Wednesday, February 11, 2009
Time: 5:30-9pm
Location: Colorado History Museum
1300 Broadway Denver, CO 80202
Admission: $20 (for both members and non members)

FOR THE LOVE OF IT

Please join us for an evening of exciting bidding on magnificent handcrafted artwork, live jazz by one of Denver's top jazz ensembles, delectable food, and drinks (open bar this year folks!). AIGA Colorado is proud to have hosted this truly unique event for the past 15 consecutive years to raise money for Project Angel Heart. So please, mark your calendars and come out to support this really great cause -- if for nothing more than for the love of it.

SPECIAL HONOR

Not only does this year mark the 15th year for Heart Art, this year also marks the 20th anniversary of the Colorado chapter of AIGA. To mark this special occasion we will be honoring the 23 founding members of the Colorado chapter and recognize their contribution to the Colorado design community. Many of our founding members will be present and examples of their design work will be on exhibit during the Heart Art event. Please join us for this special celebration as our chapter celebrates its 20th year.

WHO BENEFITS?

Project Angel Heart

Project Angel Hearts mission is to promote the health, dignity and self-sufficiency of people living with HIV/AIDS, cancer and other life-threatening illness by providing nutritious, home delivered meals with care and compassion.

AIGA Colorado

AIGA's mission is to advance designing as a professional craft, strategic tool and vital cultural force. AIGA Colorado is one of the most active and largest chapters in the nation. Our members are dedicated to raising the bar of graphic design through collaboration, communication and contributing support with fellow designers.

Special thanks to our event sponsors: Unisource, Spectrographics Printing, FOILS + DIES Vintage Pressworks, Urban Dwellers, Eye Candy Graphics and Tom Ema, of Ema Design for designing our event collateral. A very special thank you goes to Marian Halliday and Carrie Martin for putting their hearts and souls into planning this very special event.

SUBMIT NOW

We are still accepting donations of handcrafted artwork for the Heart Art auction. While the deadline to drop off your work is this Friday, it'll help us greatly if you alert us that you'll be submitting something. Enter our intent to submit form to let us know you'll be donating artwork. You'll also want to download our artist form ( http://www.aigacolorado.org/events_images/artworkartist.pdf ) that you'll attach to the artwork you'll be submitting so we know whose work we're putting on the auction block! Art work is should be submitted at one of our drop off locations by Friday, February 6th.

Please RSVP here.

For questions about the event or donating artwork, please contact AIGA CO President, Mindy Nies.

Labels: aiga, art, ebd, ellen, food, fundraising, nonprofits

posted at 11:22 AM Leave your comments here: 0 comments

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8.05.2008

(Lil) Green Patch on Facebook: what if it could do protein folding?

Like about two-thirds of my Facebook buddies, I send out "plants" to "gardens" of friends using (Lil) Green Patch, which uses sponsorship revenue from advertisers to make donations to the Nature Conservancy's Adopt an Acre program. For each plant you send, you save a little bit of rain orest. Cool, eh?

This got me to thinking, however: what if you wanted to develop an AIDS vaccine, or cure Parkinson's, or even cancer? Right now there are programs out there that use distributed computing to help researchers create complex models of how proteins interact --which in turn helps them to understand how a vaccine, for example, might fend off a virus or allow a gene to be expressed (don't ask me about the specifics, I'm just a graphic designer, after all).

In any case, in distributed computing, you allow your computer to process a portion of this protein modeling problem and then pass the results back up to the master computer at a research center where the work is being done. The processing cycles used by the program are only taken when you aren't using your computer (out to lunch, on a coffee break, in a meeting...it adds up). So there's no downside for your computer's performance when you need to use it.

So, knowing that distributed computing is out there, and knowing that people want to get together online at places like Facebook to help the planet, etc., why not develop an application that runs a little bit of programming on your computer whenever someone gives you a little virtual gift, as in (Lil) Green Patch? Admittedly, it would be more invasive than (Lil) Green Patch is, since you'd have to run something on your computer rather than just accept ad revenue from someone, but maybe you are actually paying an organization to use CPU cycles on a larger computer somewhere else using the same ad revenue donation model (Lil) Green Patch uses?

Labels: fundraising, nonprofits

posted at 10:40 AM Leave your comments here: 0 comments

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4.08.2008

Measuring the Return on Investment for Fundraising Websites

A while ago I prepared a white paper titled "Measuring Return on Investment for Fundraising Website Development" for a client of mine in the non-profit sector. I think it's important enough to share with everyone, so I've posted it here [PDF].

It covers the basics on how to measure online fundraising goals, what to expect in terms of conversion rates, what sorts of metrics are important, and more. It serves as an introduction and overview, and I'd love to talk at length to anyone who reads it and is hungry for more information.

Labels: fundraising, nonprofits, ROI

posted at 1:56 PM Leave your comments here: 0 comments

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