This past weekend I was able to attend my first Cleveland Givecamp. It is an event where technology professionals get together for a weekend and design and develop websites, mobile and desktop applications for a Non-Profit Organization. There was over 175 volunteers and together we donated an estimated $500,000 worth of services over that weekend to the selected charities.

I was aligned with Youth Challenge Sports which is an organization that offers adaptive sports programs to kids with physical disabilities. I could easily connect with their mission and was very motivated to do something good for them. They needed a look and feel refresh on an existing cms platform which was easily doable in our timeline. Our team consisted of four people a business analyst, designer and two developers. Our team worked together very well and we were able to collaborate and segment the work pretty quickly. There were also two people from the charity helping us get familiar with their CMS and entering loads of content which was a huge help since none of us had ever seen this CMS before.

It felt great being able to do this and I’m looking forward to going back in 2012 and helping another charity! If you would like to find a givecamp in your area check out givecamp.org