Nonprofit Summit

This one-day summit, new to DrupalCon this year, aims to help connect you with other nonprofit Drupal users, to learn from each other about best practices, new trends, and generate ideas. Touch base with peer experts working in our sector about how they are using Drupal to handle various challenges.  Check out what we have planned for you:
 

9:00 - 9:15 Introduction & Welcome

9:15 - 9:45 - Icebreaker
A chance to connect, informally meet some of the fellow attendees and get grounded on the days.

9:45 - 10:15 -  Keynote: Adventures in Drupal 8
Jeff Eaton, Digital Strategist at Lullabot
The aim of his talk will be to help small to mid-sized nonprofits think strategically about how to approach Drupal 8 projects, and what they can do now to improve existing Drupal 7 sites that will make it easier to move them to Drupal 8 later.

10:15 - 10:30 Coffee Break

10:30 - 11:15 - Group discussion & Table talk & Report Backs
What are some challenges that you have on the horizon when looking forward into the technical future? What are some solutions that you have found to be useful and helpful for non-profit digital space.

11:15 - 12:30 - Lunch & Presentations from Sponsors
Lunch will be served and we will have an opportunity to hear some case studies from some of the summit sponsors:

• Collaboration - Aten Design Group
  Some stories just need to be told. Chris, Director of Digital Strategy, and Joel, Director of Engineering, work closely together to create intuitive and compelling experiences for organizations to connect with their users and tell their story in the most impactful way possible. As a strategist, Chris focuses her attention on an organization’s message and content. The design and development of a web presence supports the content; not the other way around. Therefore, close collaboration is a must when translating content into development.
   
• How to Save Time and Increase Donations with Drupal - Brick Agency
  We’re the first to admit that Drupal isn’t perfect. If most of your site content is structured and consistent – like press releases – Drupal is fantastic. But, often, content managers need more flexibility. Take our client Panthera. They’re a non-profit leading wild cat conservation. Each month, we were spending hours and hours coding custom landing pages for their campaigns.
  We started searching for a tool that would make it easier for their content managers to build beautiful, flexible, content-rich pages in Drupal. We couldn’t find one. So, we built one. We’ll walk you through our recent redesign of Panthera’s website, and show how we leveraged Drupal to save our client time and money.
   
• The Power of User-Contributed Content:  Strategies for Deepening Engagement Through Storytelling - Message Agency
  Using its 100-year anniversary as a milestone, American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) sought ways to reach out to alumni—activists, volunteers, former staff—to re-engage them and deepen their relationship with the organization.  Message Agency helped AFSC develop an online strategy for collecting stories from users that not only told AFSC's collective history but also reconnected contacts to this global nonprofit, leading to new opportunities for fundraising, volunteerism, and other forms of support.  Message Agency will present a case study exploring our strategies for using Drupal to design a cost-effective and compelling site that AFSC continues to leverage after its anniversary year.

12:30 - 1:15 - Breakout Sessions

• Rapid Response Campaigns & Digital Tools
  Brett Meyer (Chief Strategy Officer) and Lev Tsypin (Founder, CEO) ThinkShout
  The news cycle doesn’t stop, and your website must help you respond to emergencies, not act as a barrier. Drupal can help you react quickly, in concert with your other channels, to turn current events into opportunities to spread your message and further your mission. In this breakout session, we’ll talk about the tools you have at your disposal in Drupal, scenarios that call for rapid rapid response solutions and how to implement them, and strategies that will help you turn these situations into lasting engagement with your constituents.

• Drupal 8 Planning and Roadmapping  
  Jess Snyder,  Senior Manager, Web Systems, WETA
  Now that Drupal 8 is out and stable, many non-profits are considering when (or whether) to make the leap.  Drupal 8 offers a number of improvements and opportunities over Drupal 7, but there are a several issues -- both technological and institutional -- that must be considered when deciding if your organization is ready.  Let's chat.
   
• Going Guerilla: Helping Nonprofits Raise More Money Through Affordable UX
  Anne Stefanyk, CEO Kanopi Studios
  Due to the reality of funding, research time is often the first cut. The problem is that cutting research often results in usability disasters. In times like these we need guerrilla research. To be ‘guerrilla’ is to practice faster, cheaper and often less formal research alternatives. Come share tactics and tools for affordable and effective user experience research.
   
• Security Strategies
  Ruby Sinreich, Web Developer & Senior Technologist, MomsRising.org
  Nonprofits can no longer afford to be lackadaisical about digital security. The past year has shown us the very real threats of targeted hacking, and spammers get more clever every day. What should we be doing to protect our Drupal sites and other organizational systems from potential attacks? Let’s share best practices and update our threat models.

1:15-2:45 - Mini Talks

• Accessibility talk - Mike Gifford
  Accessibility expert Mike Gifford will talk about the importance of building sites that accommodate one of the largest donor demographics, people over 60, who struggle with age-related disabilities, but who may not think of themselves as disabled in the more traditional sense.

• Case Study: Changing the Face of Public Education: How Fairfax County is managing 195 websites with a Drupal 8 Platform
  Nancy Moy, Fairfax County Public Schools, Kurt Voelker, Forum One
  The 10th largest school system in the country, Fairfax County Public Schools has 23,000 employees, serves 186,000 students, and 195 schools and centers. Beginning in late 2015 FCPS set out to replace the 200 individually managed websites with a single platform that would increase the quality, consistency, and management efficiency for those 200 websites. A year and half later and FCPS is now runs it's ecosystem of websites on a Drupal 8 platform.
   
• A Tale of Two Systems: Cycle for Survival
  Bobby Dodd, Creative and Production Manager for Memorial Sloan Kettering will share a tale of how systems integration and design and brand management came to together to allow Cycle for Survival to raise 30+ million dollars for rare cancer research in 2016. Learn how a best in class proprietary CRM integrated with the flexible open source Drupal CMS to deliver a consistent experience for peer-to-peer fundraisers, donors, and organizational team members.

2:45 - 3:00 Coffee break

3:00-4:30 Last breakout table topics

• Stakeholder Management
  Gordon Withers from Freeflow Digital
  One of the most fraught, nebulous, but absolutely critical tasks in a large web project -- especially in consensus-driven nonprofits -- is stakeholder identification and management. Early and thorough inclusion of stakeholders can significantly contribute to project success, and help avoid catastrophes like too-late input from "shadow" stakeholders. In this breakout session, we'll discuss strategies for stakeholder wrangling, including how to organize effective discovery interviews, how to identify the truly important stakeholders in large groups, the importance of strategic alignment, and tactics (such as decision trees) for resolving stakeholder conflicts.

• Let's Talk About...Hosting!
  Erik Mathy,  Enterprise Onboarding Manager Pantheon
  Today, more than ever, having an online presence is incredibly important. Volunteers, donors, clients and the general public all rely on the Internet to find non-profits. In order to have a website, though, one must have a place to host it. Where does your website live? In the cloud? At a co-location facility? In the closet down the hall? Do you even know? This breakout session will center around discussing the hosting needs of nonprofits of all sizes and how to choose among the many, many options that are available.

• Drupal 8 Theming Strategies
  Forum One - Dan Mouyard + Johanna Bates
  An informal chat about some of the new features, gotchas, and ins and outs of theming in Drupal 8, including accessibility. 

• Empowering Collaboration on Website Maintenance
  National Democratic Institute | Jesper Frant - Dean Valentine - Elizabeth Renomeron
  One content manager may be sufficient to run a website for a small non-profit, but what happens as your organization grows or takes on more responsibilities? Either you have a very unhappy content manager, or you adapt. How can you empower your co-workers to contribute to website maintenance? How can Drupal help you manage a flock of content managers without losing control of your website? Let’s talk about how to get your co-workers to contribute to your website and have them thank you for it.  

4:30-5:00 - Wrap Up

 

Event Information

Date: Monday, April 24th
Time: 9:00am-5:00pm (Coffee breaks and lunch included)
Cost: $150

Register Now!

Sponsors