Social Design

Design is a big part of what CiviCore does.  We use participatory design practices to work with our clients in order to build the best possible information architecture for their needs.  Because of this, the practice of design is an area of great interest to us.  By employing innovative design practices, we see a great opportunity to make positive and lasting change on the local, national, and international levels.  There have been several interesting articles published in the last few weeks that we thought were well worth reading, and we'd like to share them with you.  Check 'em out:

http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/11/06/berger.qanda/index.html

http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/design_thinking_for_social_innovation/

http://www.ideo.com/work/item/human-centered-design-toolkit/

CiviCore attends the Rebuilding Together National Conference!

Last week, CiviCore Project Manager Joni Zisman attended the Rebuilding Together National Conference in Washington, D. C.  Here's what Joni had to say about the event:  "The Rebuilding Together Conference in DC last week was a hoot!  It was great to see that attendance was over double last year!  Lots of folks from affiliates using or interested in using the database stopped by - one even said she wanted to get a CiviCore tattoo, she loves the database so much!"

We would like to thank Rebuilding Together for being such great clients, and we look forward to attending their National Conference again next year!

CiviCore is now on Twitter!

Check us out at www.twitter.com/civicore !

Community Information - Why it matters

CiviCore presented at the annual American Evaluation Association Conference in Orlando, FL. The focus of the presentation was on the value of community information resources to those working in the social sector. We got to demo our cool community information projects such as Piton.org, ColoradoSchoolChoice.org and CivicIndicators.org. We also discussed preliminary results of our study on how this type of information makes a difference in the community. Thanks to those in attendance for the great discussion. For a copy of presentation slides click here.

Operation Jump Start and CiviCore to co-present at Youth Mentoring Conference

We are proud to announce that we were recently invited to present alongside Operation Jump Start Executive Director Dara Cerwonka at the 11th Annual Friends for Youth Mentoring Conference. The conference is titled: Youth Mentoring 2.0: The Impact of Technology on Programs and Relationships, and will be held in Northern California on January 21 and 22 of 2010.

Our session is tentatively titled “One Giant Leap: Moving from Paper and Spreadsheets to an Integrated Database Tracking System." We look forward to this great opportunity not only to present alongside Operation Jump Start but also to learn even more about the field of youth mentoring.

CiviCore presents on Evidence-Based Decision Making for Nonprofits

Chic Naumer from CiviCore and Matt Barry from the Piton Foundation presented at the Colorado Nonprofit Association (http://www.coloradononprofits.org) annual conference. The topic of the presentation was evidence-based decision making and the evidenced based movement. Information systems designed to provide nonprofits with information they need to make evidence-based decisions were discussed. A lively discussion followed as attendees discussed what the evidence-based movement means to nonprofits. More information on evidence-based decision is posted at http://www.civicore.com/evidence.

Deane Venske joins CiviCore full-time!

We are excited to announce that Deane Venske has recently joined the CiviCore team full-time as a Senior Software Engineer.

Deane has worked with us for more than a year now, but we are thrilled that he can now devote all of his time and energy to our work here at CiviCore.  Welcome, Deane!

CiviCore to attend the Rebuilding Together National Conference

Project Manager Joni Zisman will be representing CiviCore at the Rebuilding Together National Conference in Washington, DC this November.  We are proud of the work have done for this great organization, and excited to learn more about their national work at this conference.

For more information on the conference, or the Rebuilding Together organization, follow this link: http://www.rebuildingtogether.org/section/about/conference

Breaking News: Volunteerism is on the rise!

An article in USA today recently confirmed what CiviCore has suspected for a while now: Volunteerism in America is on the rise.  According to Sharing in the USA, by Julie Snider and Mark Pearson, "The number of adults in 2008 performing volunteer service through an organization rose by about a million from 2007, to 61.8 million.  They donated about 8 billion hours of service, worth an estimated $162 billion."  Spurred by the economic downturn, non-profit and charitable organizations have increasingly turned to volunteers to sustain their work, it seems.

We have certainly noticed this increase, too.  We are seeing more and more organizations contacting us with a need for a platform to organize and manage their recent influx of volunteers, mentors, and clients.  CiviCore is proud to help these volunteer organizations utilize technology in order to maximize the benefit of this increasing American volunteerism, and we certainly hope that this trend continues into the future!

“Digital Inclusion” Published

“Digital Inclusion: Measuring the Impact of Information and Community Technology” edited by Michael Crandall and Karen E. Fisher was just published. This book provides a framework for thinking about the effects of community technology on digital inclusion. CiviCore founder Charles Naumer wrote three chapters for this book on a Framework for Measurement.


For a chapter preview, more information, or to order the book, please visit: InfoToday or Amazon

Dr. Mentor comes to CiviCore!

Last month CiviCore hosted a luncheon presentation featuring Dr. Susan Weinberger, aka "Doctor Mentor," with more than 25 of our Denver and Colorado-based mentoring agency clients in attendance.

Dr. Weinberger (aka. "Dr. Mentor") has been recognized for her expertise in establishing, maintaining, and evaluating school and community-based mentoring programs and school-to-work initiatives.  She is the former Chair of the Public Policy Council of MENTOR/National Mentoring Partnership, and is a consultant to the U.S. Departments of Education, Health and Human Services, Labor, and Justice on their mentoring initiatives.  Amongst other accolades, she also traveled to the White House in 1993 to receive President Clinton's coveted Volunteer Action Award for her work in mentoring.  Needless to say, Dr. Weinberger is a nationally recognized expert in the field of mentoring.

Dr. Weinberger presented strategies for agencies to effectively establish and maintain their school and community-based mentoring programs.  The presentation and luncheon fit perfectly into CiviCore's mission of enabling non-profit organizations to operate more effectively and efficiently.  We would like to thank both Dr. Weinberger and all of our clients for making this happen.

P.S.  Keep your eyes and ears out for more CiviCore lunch presentations in the future!

Nike / LeBron James / Up2Us Volunteer Site goes live!

We are happy to announce the launch of yet another CiviCore-powered client website, http://volunteer.up2us.org/. The site is the result of a collaboration between CiviCore, Up2Us, and Nike. The site is being promoted by LeBron James as he tours cities around the world.

Up2Us is a national coalition that seeks to increase the impact of and access to youth sports as a tool for positive youth development. To that end, they asked us to develop a website for them which would link willing volunteers to local basketball teams in need of a coach. They ask, we deliver: Check out Volunteer.Up2Us.org here!

Paul Cacamo, the Executive Director of Up2Us, has this to say about the new site and Nike's efforts ot promote it: "Behind every player is a coach and a team whose collaboration inspires greatness. Lebron and Nike Basketball are asking you to join the President and First Lady Obama's campaign, United We Serve, to find out how you can volunteer to be a coach in a community near you. Great players need great leaders on their courts and in their lives. Become one now"

GiveBlackHills.org is launched!

We are excited to announce the launch of another CiviCore-powered website -  GiveBlackHills.org!

The GiveBlackHills site was made for the Black Hills Area Community Foundation as an online resource for information about Black Hills area charities.

It offers visitors the ability to both learn more about and directly donate to charities working hard to improve the Black Hills area community.  We here at CiviCore are proud to have had the opportunity to work with an organization as dedicated to charitable causes as BHACF, and we hope you will check out the GiveBlackHills.org site!

ColoradoSchoolChoice.org goes live!

After months of hard work, we are proud to announce that ColoradoSchoolChoice.org is now up and running.  The site is the result of a collaboration between Civicore, the Piton Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation, Daniels Fund, Colorado Children's Campaign, DenverLibrary.org, and our media partner, 9news.


The Colorado School Choice tool is designed to supply parents with the kind of information they need to help them make better-informed decisions about the schools they choose to place their children in.  The site not only gives the user the ability to search for and and browse local schools, but also allows the user to compare different schools in their area based on factors like school performance, growth, included programs, and CSAP proficiency.  Check it out!

P.S.  The 9news website already has some promotion banners on their homepage, but keep your eyes and ears open for their upcoming T.V. commercial campaign promoting ColoradoSchoolChoice.org!

We've got a new site!

We've launched our new website - check it out by clicking the "Home" tab above, or by going to http://www.civicore.com/

We hope you like the new design as much as we do!

Ocean Conservancy's - Sign Up to Clean Up goes live!

After months of hard work, Civicore is proud to announce the launch of signuptocleanup.org, the Ocean Conservancy's new website which matches potential volunteers to local ocean cleanup sites.

Signuptocleanup utilizes Civicore's powerful database management software in order to to match potential volunteers located everywhere in the world to nearby cleanup sites, give detailed information about these cleanup sites, and even provide visitors the ability to register to participate in a cleanup with just a single click!

CiviCore founder Charles Naumer presents at the OECD / Census Bureau / World Bank Conference

Recently, CiviCore Founder and Partner Charles Naumer delivered a presentation (see video) at the "Seminar on Innovative Approaches to Turn Statistics into Knowledge" sponsored by the OECD, U.S. Census Bureau and sponsored by the World Bank.

Charles' talk was focused on the School Choice Wizard, a collaborative between Civicore, the Piton Foundation, and 9news. The Wizard is being developed by Civicore as an extension of the Piton Foundation's education policy work in making data and tools to support informed decision-making more widely available. It seeks to help parents find the best school for their children utilizing a simple interface that asks parents to rank their priorities for potential school environments, as opposed to merely listing statistics, rankings and charts.

The "Colorado School Choice Wizard," presented Wednesday at the conference, seeks to help parents find the best school in a different way. With its simple interface, it doesn't rely on statistics, rankings and charts -- at least, not on the dashboard. That's all under the hood. "The approach," according to Naumer, "is to help parents determine what factors are important, then find the school that matches those priorities."

Charles' presentation was extremely well received, and caught enough attention to get its own news story on Poynter Online, which you can find here.

Keep your eyes open for the School Choice Wizard's launch in October '09 on the 9news website!

CiviCore Client Wins CNN Hero of the Year!

Liz McCartney, Executive Director of St. Bernard Project in New Orleans was recently honored as CNN's Hero of the Year. Liz was chosen from an amazing group of finalists from around the world. CiviCore is proud to provide St. Bernard Project with a database solution for managing the thousands of volunteers who help St. Bernard rebuild homes in New Orleans.
Congrats Liz!

CiviCore Client Wins Prestigious El Pomar Foundation Excellence in Education Award

CiviCore client, Reach Out and Read was honored by the Colorado Springs-based El Pomar Foundation with the Excellence in Education Award. Reach Out and Read distributes over 135,000 books to 81,000 children per year in over 100 clinics around the state of Colorado. CiviCore created an integrated web-based system for this dynamic agency to help them track book distributions, clinic contacts and other critical information. Congrats to Reach Out and Read!