Cooper Dukes

Classes start tomorrow, so now is a good time for me to look back on this summer and evaluate what I did and what I could have done better. While I can’t say that I’ll remember summer 2010 as one of the happiest times in my life, it has by far been the most productive. Socially, I pretty much isolated myself completely,  but I did a lot of work that I’m proud of and that I suspect will help me in the future:

• I honed my personal workflow, nailing how to seek out leads, convert them into clients/projects, track my hours worked, keep up the communication momentum with clients, and close out the project with an invoice and a payment.
• I developed my personal collateral: my website, bio/specialities sheet, resume, offerings sheet, business cards, social network profiles, and more. I’m pleased with my designs on all of these, and I can use this work to market who I am and what I do, even as those aspects evolve over time.
• I spoke at Strategy For Good 1.0. It was great practice presenting, made me a lot of good contacts, and was a lot of fun. I also feel like people actually learned something because of me, which is a pretty good feeling.
• I learned to cook…-ish. I still need to expand my repertoire, but it’s good to know I won’t starve without a dining hall. I also kept my vegetarian diet, excepting one run-in with some bolognese sauce. (Didn’t know that had meat in it…)
• I expanded my technical skills, picked up several new clients, and wrote my first contracts ever.
• I figured out what I want to do with my life. I don’t quite have the details down, but I have a vision and a mission. Hopefully, that will be enough to sustain me for awhile.

Of course, there are some things I could have done differently.

• I basically saw no one all summer, socially. I need to strike a balance between never being alone and always being alone…never have been good at that.
• I worked for Georgetown Housing. It got me free housing and a decent amount of money, but it was incredibly unfulfilling work. I probably would have been better off paying for housing and doing independent development work instead.
• My meals became repetitive pretty fast, and I probably didn’t eat as cheaply nor as nutritionally as I could have.

I suppose the good parts of this summer outweigh the bad, but either way, I’m not ready for school to start. I’d much rather be doing real work than pretending to learn from (outdated) class Power Points. I’m ready to leave this country for awhile.

These past couple years, I’ve thought of a lot of business/website/activity ideas. Most of them are rubbish. A few I really like, but I have no time to properly pursue. A couple (such as this website) I’ve actually gone ahead and done, to varying degrees of success. I have enough ideas that I’ve actually started using a self-hosted installation of SugarCRM’s community edition to track them from conception to feasibility analysis to realization (or lack thereof). My list is getting quite long, so I’d like to put a few of these seeds out into the world. After all, they’re doing no good archived in my projects file!

1. OurVoorhees – A social network of sorts that we designed with our hometown in mind, directly linking businesses, schools, local government, and residents in order to create an open, constructive dialogue. Site functions would have ranged from community updates, to deals and promotions, to neighbourhood-based classified ads. We got as far as the development stage on this, before getting mired down by our inability to find a competent designer. Ironically, I know enough now to make this site a reality, but I have no desire to work in the suburbs, and several tools have come along that collectively fulfill many of OurVoorhees’s roles.
2. HUMUN – A distributed SMS volunteerism system. I forget what the acronym stood for, but the idea here was to use SMS texting to quickly coordinate and deploy volunteers. Interested people would sign up on a website, giving their location, phone number, available hours, nonprofits of interest, etc. When in need of help for a project, event staffing, or the like, a nonprofit could put out a call on the HUMUN network. A text message would go out to the relevant site subscribers giving the essential information, and they could RSVP via text. The hope with HUMUN was to make volunteering an organic process, lowering the barrier to entry and maximizing individuals’ effectiveness. I didn’t (and still don’t) have the technical knowledge or the time for this one. It would also be costly, with no sustainable revenue source.
3. Service Tracking & Accountability System – (Never gave it an official name.) I envisioned this as an answer to administrative bureaucracy and inaction at the local, organizational, or university level. (Especially at the university level.) Essentially, an entity-specific website would allow constituents/customers/students to submit issue tickets for problems that the entity in question is responsible for addressing. This might be a pothole for a small town government, a poor product description for an organization, or a facilities issue for a university. The site would email the ticket information to the relevant person(s) within the entity while publicly featuring the issue on the site, giving both entity employees and users the opportunity to comment on the issue and its resolution status. Over time, entity-wide and department-wide statistics would give potential users the opportunity to evaluate the entity’s responsiveness before choosing to engage it (by moving to the town, doing business with the company, or attending the university). Hopefully, such publicity might have shamed bureaucracy into improving! I still might work on this one, one day.

Following on the heels of my recommending 37signals‘ Basecamp last week, I’m now going to plug their new business book, Rework. It’s a short collection of essays from the company’s blog, Signal vs. Noise, that you should be able to finish in one sitting. It looks deceptively simple since half the book is pictures, but the ideas really struck me as true and important and long overdue. Rather than review the book as a whole (you can find plenty of better reviews than I can write on Amazon), I want to emphasize some of the most important takeaways I got from Rework.

1. “Why grow?” – The theme of the book is basically to ask the questions that you’re not used to asking in business, and growth is an excellent example. Why should a successful business grow? If you do something, do it well, make a profit, and have a satisfied customer base, why should expansion be looked upon as a given? I wish Georgetown would ask this question…
2. “Workaholism” – Rework dispels the image of the noble, martyr workaholic. If you can’t get your job done working 9-5, then you either aren’t working efficiently or there’s a greater company-wide issue at play.
3. “Enough with ‘entrepreneurs‘” – I actually said the exact same thing in a meeting a few months ago, namely why do we insist on labeling entrepreneurs as a special class, to the exclusion of others? Rework advises throwing out the entrepreneurial vocabulary and opting for a simpler moniker: “starters.”
4. “Start a business, not a startup” – I run into this issue all the time working with nonprofits. They make companies and draw on the ‘startup’ label as an excuse for not succeeding, ignoring the fact that their business model is neither profitable nor sustainable.
5. “Meetings are toxic” – Well they are, as I complained about last week. I like the book’s ideas for diminishing the damage, such as setting a concrete cap on meeting length, inviting as few people as possible, and gathering at the site of the problem, not in a conference room.
6. “Good enough is fine” – I run into this one a lot, too. Essentially, a client demands a perfect, comprehensive, expensive solution and won’t settle for anything less, ignoring the fact that while s/he quixotically quests for such a remedy, there is no solution in place, whatsoever.
7. “Build an audience” – The internet has enabled business and customers to interact in entirely new ways. Mass marketing (read: spam) isn’t necessary anymore. Instead, if you say something worthwhile and say it consistently, your customers will come to you.
8. “Marketing is not a department” – Last year, I had to take Marketing 101, and I could not understand why it was a class. Everything is marketing. Every phone call, every email, every flyer, every receptionist, every business suit (or there lack of). It made no sense to me why anyone would attempt to restrict marketing to a simple class.
9. “Hire great writers” – Maybe my favorite piece of advice from Rework. Basically, a good writer is a good thinker is a good organizer is a good communicator. Resumes can be fabricated and “experience” is too vague to have meaning, but good writing shines on its own.
10. “Own your bad news” – Applicable to so many disasters today…BP…the finance industry…the US government…Georgetown University. When the only one who denies that you messed up is you, lying only digs you deeper.

Rework is $12 on Amazon, and free at your local library, so there’s no excuse to pass on this essential text!

On August 2nd, a group of nonprofit development and internet strategy professionals gave a four part talk to a group of nonprofit professionals, community members, and college students.

I delivered the first talk, concerned with the essentials of creating the foundation for an organization’s online presence.

Marcus Finley spoke on how to use social media to generate social action.

Julia Rota discussed the subject of financially empowering nonprofits through proper grant development practices.

Rahul Singh concluded with a comprehensive overview of executing internet strategy.

We will be reconvening soon to plan Strategy for Good 2.0, which will be taking place in late October. If you would like to help, participate, or attend, please let us know by contacting us at sfg@asitchanges.com. All of the talks and presentations are available at our Vimeo account.