We invite you to help us as we provide technology services and support to nonprofits.
Donate Now!Event Planning for Nonprofits
Another question that came up during my presentation at Craigslist boot camp was, "How do I find those event planning templates that you talk about during your 10 Nonprofit Operations Success Steps?" Well here they are…
Aspiration has become fairly well known in the nonprofit tech world for our unique event planning and facilitation methods. I think it helps that we have Allen Gunn a super and amazing facilitator leading our organization. (I’m not biased, really I’m not :) Anyway, we have created a set of event planning templates and materials so we can easily replicate our events. Nonprofits and Foundations even hire us to plan and facilitate events for them and its a lot of fun since we have streamlined the process.
Here are the materials we use.
1. Our event planning checklist/timeline template helps us step-by-step plan each event.
2. We also created a wiki which describes all aspects about planning a successful event.
3. Collaborative and participatory events are very important to us, so we have created a set of facilitator guidelines as well as participant guidelines to follow at the event.

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Great Planning info
Dear Heather:
This is an amazing resource. Nice job. I would enjoy talking about this on my podcast show PlanIt Podcast. The show is a labor of love and our goal is to give great information to meeting and event planners.
Would it be ok?
David
Great info and now thinking about event knowledge capture
Heather:
I’m sending you questions re: an interview on blogher … but in the meantime, I’ve been obsessing about how to use Web2.0 tools for knowledge capture and sharing at nonprofit conferences/events. I was wondering if you have thought about this and had any advice? My posts are here:
http://beth.typepad.com/bethsblog/2006/08/itsallaboutt.html http://beth.typepad.com/bethsblog/2006/08/collaborativem.html
Web 2.0 collaborative tools at conferences and events
Beth:
Thanks for your comment. I am still learning about collaborative web 2.0 tools but I can tell you that Aspiration uses several web 2.0 tools at our events.
First we have an wiki for each event, for example our most recent event wiki is from AdvocacyDev III. During the event we ask conference attendees to post their notes from each session they attended. It’s exciting because the notes are posted during the event, so people can read the notes immediately following each session and not miss out on the sessions that they were unable to attend. Also, people who didn’t attend the event, can read the notes from the Wiki too.
We also encourage conference attendees to post their pictures on Flickr and tag them with that specific conference name. As you can probably tell from our site, we really like pictures, and we have been successful in aggregating the Aspiration pictures posted on Flickr.
Heather