GiveCamp Cookbook

The Main Event!

Organizing and running a successful GiveCamp event involves keeping up with a lot of different aspects of event management:

  1. Volunteers
  2. Venue
  3. Sponsors
  4. Charities
  5. Prizes & Giveaways
  6. Ceremony
  7. Timeline
  8. Volunteers

GiveCamp is a fun and exciting event to be part of but does not come for free. As with any large-scale event, running a successful GiveCamp requires a lot of coordination work to bring all the pieces together. Ideally, the leadership team for an event like this would consist of 3 main players:

  • Leader: someone, or perhaps a few someones, to serve as spokespersons for the event. They would take on the accountability for making sure that the event actually happens, recruit other leaders, approve spending, etc. Basically – this person is the central point of contact for the event.
  • Participant Coordinator: this person would be responsible for recruiting developers, designers, dba’s and other participants for the event. They would be responsible for putting together the communications for this group and work to assign them to charities once collected. An important aspect of this position is making sure that you have enough, strong candidates on each team to prevent problems arising from lack of technical skill.
  • Charity Coordinator: this person is responsible for identifying and qualifying charities and other non-profits for participation in the event. The big “gotcha” here is making sure that the development teams will have enough information to build something for the charity. The developers should get some 1:1 time with the charity reps at the beginning of the event, but the more pre-qualification can be done before the event the better.

Part of being a leader is having people to lead J There is no way that one or two people could pull off an event like this of any scale without getting help. There are several other roles (not necessarily separate people) that are critical to the success of the event, and are listed here:

  • Analyst – part of the charity pre-qualification involves learning about the charities that have applied and determining if the charity is a good fit for the event. Typical analyst duties include
  • calling the charity to determine initial requirements and scope
  • writing up a summary of the charity’s requirements for public consumption and team assignments
  • Serving as point of contact for that charity in communicating dates, times, and other charity responsibilities
  • Venue Coordination – someone on the team will need to make sure that a venue has been selected that is large enough to support the size of the event, and provides adequate space for the different teams to work. See Venue section below for more information

Venue

Our first event was done at a training facility that had multiple cubicles and office spaces for us to work in. An alternative is to get one big giant room, like a gymnasium, and have tables for people to work at. It would probably be noisy this way, but would probably feel more like a larger group effort – like Hack Fest does when everyone is in the same room. For the first event, our venue coordinator worked with a couple of sponsors to help pay for meals and made sure that they were ordered, delivered and set up on time. Having snacks around and a couple of Xbox 360s also helped people take the occasional breaks as well.

Sponsors

“You can’t have something for nothing…” – Rush, Something for Nothing Sponsorship is the key to funding the event. Good items for sponsorship include:

  • Venue
  • T-Shirts
  • Stickers
  • Goodie-bag items for Developers
  • Goodie-bag items for Charities
  • Meals and Snacks
  • Drinks (one of our sponsors bought us an Iced Tea maker!)
  • Trophies and recognition awards such as certificates, medals, buttons, etc.

Charities

Obviously, the Charities/Non-Profits are a key aspect of the event. Recruiting widely and early will help get the most out of the event. For the 35 charities that responded to our original request, we ended up with 18 going into the competition. The decision to pair them down this far was based on the number of developers we had participating, the size of the venue we would be working in, and the requests of the charities themselves. It was important to us to make sure that the participating charities were actually non-profits and/or charities, and that they had well defined requirements that our teams had a good chance of completing by the end of the weekend. Based on what we learned from the first of these events, all participating charities should be encouraged to attend as much of the event as possible. Having representatives from the charities on site made a BIG difference not only in the quality of the development products produced, but helped raise the morale of the development teams to have someone with whom they could work closely on their development. The happiest of development teams came from those that got to spend a large amount of time with their charities.

Prizes & Giveaways

For each of the charities, we offered up a “basket of goodies” containing books and software. This is a *great* place to get Microsoft involved as a sponsor – sponsoring these baskets. Here’s what was in our basket:

  • Visual Studio 2005 (2008 had not yet been released)
  • Expression Suite
  • Vista Ultimate
  • Office 2007 Ultimate
  • Programming SQL Server 2005
  • Expression Web Step by Step
  • Expression Design Step by Step

Ceremony and Parties

The We Are Microsoft event employed both a pre-event kick-off meeting, and a post-event demo+awards meeting. The pre-event kickoff meeting is intended to accomplish several goals:

  • Get everyone together, face to face, so that we can all meet
  • Give the developers a chance to meet charity representatives in a 1:1 environment
  • Give the developers a chance to meet their development teams
  • Describe the rules of the competition, if there is to be a competition
  • Give all sponsors a chance to speak in front of the participants
  • Give the charities their goodie bags
  • Give the developers their goodie bags

The post-event meeting accomplished the following goals:

  • Give each development team the opportunity to demonstrate their solutions to the entire audience
  • Award prizes
  • Food, Fun and Fellowship after the event
  • Put a “bow” on the event

Timeline

More to come…

Other Notes

  • Consider creating some type of document that both the charity/non-profit and the developers sign that basically says "what happens at GiveCamp stays at GiveCamp". This document would protect the charity from developers that don't turn over source code or try to charge the charity, and protect the develpers from being forced to maintain the code they developed at the event.
  • When organizing your event be sure to contact any PMI (Project Management Institute), IIBA (The International institute of Business Analysis, ISSA (Information Systems Security Association), AITP (Association of Information Technology Professionals) chapters or any other user groups in your area they can be invaluable resources.