Libba's story here:

A nonprofit perspective and some news I’d like to share….

As some of you may recall – I came to Wine Camp with very little knowledge of the tech world and great hopes that there would be someone who could take my lofty dreams of creating a database to support our cause of ‘navigating the lost highway for missing kids off the grid’. I was not prepared for the outpouring of ideas and the can do spirit of Zack, Lobo, Kurund and many others. Your enthusiasm and support restored my hope and faith in humanity in ways I cannot express.

As a result of that experience, the great team support and training that took place afterwards, a bit of trial and error, and the dedication of a very special volunteer here in Sacramento, Inelia Benz, we FINALLY realized our dream of a CMS open source website just launched last week! www.outpostforhope.org

One of the greatest challenges we’ve had as an all volunteer staffed nonprofit is that we have not yet realized the resources, paid staff, funding etc. that would permit implementation of some of the fantastic tools we learned about at Wine Camp. We are a very small team – think just a few folks around a kitchen table – but now we can grow as a result of a good structure in place to help us move forward! I thank you for making Wine Camp happen last year, the support we received and for the training that occurred after WineCamp as a result of Zack, Lobo, Paul Resnick, and others who shared their time, talent, and training to get our sole volunteer website manager up to speed. She learned Joomla, a great deal about Drupal, got some experience with CiviCRM, and was able to explore other resources as a result of this experience. We are now looking at a database option that we hope to have implemented by this spring – this is a very exciting time for us to realize these goals!

We were able to carry on with our goals as a result of what we learned and now we have a fabulous website that is so much more efficient than we knew was possible and this will allow us to focus on helping the most vulnerable of missing children and consider the next phase of our database management.

I learned a little about branding at Wine Camp and that helped me to come up with some marketing strategies and we have a cool little film on our site that we’re also promoting on YouTube.. Go to www.outpostforhope.org and click on our Founder’s Page to check it out. Thanks to conversations with Seth M. – we implemented a fun little blog as well on our site. And as a result of a conversations with another GoodStorm participant – the brilliant Laney from the Princess Project - we now have a very creative t-shirt for sale now! https://www.goodstorm.com/stores/outpost_for_hope

One thing I might suggest for your next winecamp gathering is to develop some kind of questionnaire for your nonprofit attendees who are usually technically challenged… (but not always!) J to find out what support they may have for technical projects and/or some kind of template they can use to fill in the blanks themselves to determine what kind of support they may need to take on their own to realize their technical goals.

I’m sure all of you have heard the recent news of Shawn Hornbeck, the boy who was found after missing 4 years… it is my hope that as a result of our public becoming more informed about lost children, we have a more open door to shining the light on the population of invisible missing children that most people do not even know exist – and receiving support for our efforts to help the ‘the kids off the grid” ™ Thank you again so very much for this experience – each of you in some way – has had a hand in helping us create something magnificent… now we can be about the business of sharing our mission with the community at large so that we can help the most vulnerable of our society. You rock!!

Blessings and best wishes in all you do!!