This past weekend, I attended my second GiveCamp in Cleveland. Lasting from 5:00pm Friday to 3:00pm Sunday, 25 non-profit organizations benefited from the event thanks to the hard work of 203 volunteers! The vast majority of technical issues that GiveCamp non-profits faced were that their website was poorly designed, hard to update, and didn’t reflect their core message.

I worked in a small team with a non-profit* to completely overhaul their website to WordPress. By the end of GiveCamp, the organization was adding all of their content (heavily edited thanks to the copywriter volunteers) themselves, fixing one of the major problems they previously struggled with. As a result their new website can easily stay current with up to date information. It is important that the organization is self-sufficient by the end because at the end of the weekend, all the source code gets bundled up and turned over to the charities. Charities cannot expect the developers to support or maintain their codebase afterwards.

The most important part of Givecamp is that the non-profit organizations are able to not only benefit from an improved website but they are able to reach out to others regarding their offered services. And this is why GiveCamp is the most fulfilling weekend a developer can have.

*Note: As of this blog post, the new site hasn’t gone live yet. They are still in the midst of entering content.