Viral Marketing

I spend most of my time talking about technology and partners. I don't spend much time talking about marketing. So here is a snipit about the approach that Todd is driving and we will be taking.

Before jumping into that, just to back up. We are interested in motivating high school age students to explore and create. To find their passion. To learn by doing. To blow us away with the ideas that they have!

We think we will be able to help them to do this by providing a site that allows them to investigate and explore. When they find something interesting, they will participate in the relevant community or communities and do a project or activity. Out job is to insure that have what is required to make this a good experience.

So with all of that being said - how do we find the students. How do we get them to check us out? That is where Marketing comes in. We will market FreshBrain to the students using a number of different means. Some are fairly traditional but others are very web2.0:). Here are some examples.

• Flyers on Facebook, advertisements on other community sites. The cost is low and Facebook for example provides a way to target these flyers at kids in the 14-18 year old range.

• Blog and forum (is that a verb????) in the relevant communities. This will not just be us doing the blogging or interacting with folks in these communities. We will recruit folks who are active and leaders in these communities to do it for us!!

• Market the concept to organizations that support home school, charter schools and traditional school districts. Huge opportunities to leverage these as it will not be FreshBrain creating the curriculum but instead providing a project and activity platform in support of the curriculum created. As we become an option, the home school parents as well as the charter schools will come to us.

• Raise awareness with parents through sites and communities where they participate. In a manner similar to that described above for the students - connect with parents and help them to understand the benefits so that FreshBrain is an extra curricular activity that the parents support or promote.

• Introduce the site by invitation only. Rather than open it up and see if they will come, target an active initial student population through invitations. Give invitations out on a limited basis. Give students who complete projects or activities their own invitations to give out.
  

Hope that was interesting. Just a quick peak into some of the approaches that we will be pursuing!

Projects and Activities

At the core of FreshBrain are Projects and Activities. As I share the FreshBrain concept with more and more people, I have realized that it is important to carefully explain these. We have done that for the Technology Area Community Managers that I described in an earlier post, but I have not shared that definition on my blog. So here goes ...

• Project - an extensive task undertaken by student(s) to take an idea and turn it into something substantial. A project can range from something that one person completes in a number of weeks to that which a team completes in a number of months. It will typically follow a fairly standard creation process which includes a number of phases. The complete experience usually involves going through a systematic process to simulate real business scenarios where projects are justified through some quantifiable metrics, including preparing a business plan and building the technical 'end product'.

• Activity - a reasonably simple, pre-designed task undertaken typically by a number of students independently to take an idea and create something useful. An activity would often be completed in a number of days to weeks. There are two categories of activities: Open and Sponsored. Open activities are always available to the students to complete. There are no deadlines and no rewards associated with their completion (other than maybe a certificate or similar). Sponsored activities are available for a limited duration with a deadline and rewards. They are most often sponsored by another company but can be sponsored by FreshBrain as well.

Students will likely go through a number of steps before they start a project or activity. Here is the complete flow. Some students will start at the top, others will enter further down, especially if they already know where their passion lies and may have an idea of what they want to do.

1. Interest
2. Explore
3. Investigate
4. Engage
5. Participate
6. Project / Activity

And of course the real learning takes place when they do one of these projects or activities, work through the process, use the tools and technologies and see their idea come to life!

We are the Same and Different

Explaining what FreshBrain is all about is sometimes simple and other times hard. Might be bacause I am an engineer at my core and want to explain it all in great detail. Or it might be based on the background and experience of the individual(s) that I am explaining it to.

An article in the San Jose Mercury News might make it more clear. So here goes.

The article is "Summer camps offer kids fun, games, programming." This talks about what appear to be excellent camps run by iD Tech Computer Camps. These camps are held at universities across the US (and in Spain). In these camps kids age 7 - 17 mix fun activities that are location dependent (surfing in Santa Cruz) with providing them the opportunity to do very cool things with technology.

In many ways, this is what we are doing. But it is focused on the right hand side of the normal distribution of kids. That is, those kids that have the money to pay for a camp, recognize the importance of this kind of additional learning, and/or have parents who are involved in one of these industries.
It really doesn't hit the larger number of kids that are in the middle of that same normal distribution. That is where we come in!! We will provide an opportunity for any high school age student to investigate, engage, participate and create. At no cost. With advisors and a large community to support them (better than the 6:1 ratio iD Tech Computer Camps provides). On the latest technology platform. And when they are done, they will end up with a certificate of completion and potentially letters of recommendation as well as scholarships.

We are not like iD Tech Computer Camps, Cybercamps, Bay Area Video Coalition, or any of the other hands-on nonprofits or companies in the technology space. What they do is truly excellent and needed - I hope they grow and prosper. What I want to do is partner with all of them!!

It is not about competition for us. It is about the kids.

Crazy crazy crazy

Having never been in a startup, maybe this is just what life will be like running FreshBrain. It is energizing, exciting, interesting, fast paced, always something new, both deep and broad, a bit scary and just crazy.

Here are a hand full of the things that are going on this week.

• I get a call from a law firm who wants to be our SOLE provider of pro bono legal services. I am dieing to tell you who it is, but can't yet. Maybe in a week or so. But this is huge!

• Todd calls me to tell me about a meeting he had with a leader in Utah who is going to personally introduce us to the right people at the top 10 of the more than 250 companies that he worked very closely with. Personally introduce us. Even fly out and make the introduction(s) in some cases.

• Stan and CT are spending the better part of the week working with our interns (2) and consultant. Getting them up to speed on Drupal, AJAX, PHP, and what we intend to do with the website. Note that this is three more people added to our team of one (Stan). What is that, a 300% increase! I wandered in and by a couple of times.

• I met with our team of technology area community managers (volunteers). They are coming up to speed in their role and will begin to define the content, communities and structure necessary to involve and motivate the students. These are very smart and motivated folks!

• I met with Adobe. Specifically a former EVP at Sun and now SVP of the Creative Solutions Business Unit at Adobe, John Loiacono. I also met with the Michelle Mann who is a Senior Group Manager for Corporate Affairs. I am very hopeful that we will find ways to partner in order to provide students with content and tool from Adobe.

• I went to City Hall in San Francisco to meet with a high school buddy of mine Chris Iglesias. Chris is now the Director of CityBuild, an economic and workforce development program under Mayor Gavin Newsom (check out the video). And with Marc Majors a Workforce Development Manager there as well. We talked about how FreshBrain might support the programs that they have in place. There appear to be a number of promising opportunities!

• Met with another volunteer who signed up to help us evaluate productivity software to provide to the students. The first area he will focus is in web conferencing!

• We signed up a partner to help us with the first version of the website - to go live in a few weeks. They are ImageX Media located in Canada. We selected them based on their deep expertise around Drupal. They will create the wireframes, cascading style sheets and all other aspects of the user interface. The first version of our website will be primarily focused on allowing us to run a couple of contests, but will also serve as a place where students, parents, and others can go to learn more about FreshBrain.

• I did a bunch of administrivia. Filled out a questionnaire in preparation for a meeting to discuss insurance. Started the paperwork to enable the cash donation from Sun to FreshBrain. Prepared for the end of the quarter with finance. And ordered a few more systems for our developers.
  

I am sure I missed a few things. Quite a week and it is only Wednesday:)

Starting to Reach Out to Nonprofit Parthers

I thought I would do something different with my blog this time. I want to see if I can get any good feedback and recommendations.

One of our goals as an organization is to insure that we are partnering where ever possible. We don't and will never have the resources to do it all ourselves. And even if we did, it would be a huge mistake to try. It makes a lot more sense to partner with organizations doing similar or complementary things.

We have the beginnings of the list of nonprofits that we have contacted or intend to contact shortly. Here is the list that we have today ...

• Junior Achievement
• Boys and Girls Club
• CityYear
• NSTA (National Science Teachers Association)
• All Kinds of Minds
• Girls Inc.
• Girl Scouts
• Boy Scouts
• Big Brothers and Sisters

So you can see that this is a good start, but we need a better list. Please add your thoughts on who we should be partnering in the comments section, or if you are more comfortable sending it to me in email, please do to dale.ferrario@freshbrain.org. I would love any thoughts you have, and if you know someone in the organization, please include that as well. Thanks!

Interns on the way, working on first contest and other stuff

I am feeling the pressure of a January release and it is only September!!

Lots of interesting things going on this week. Let me hit on a couple of big ones.

• The Interns are coming. We have three interns starting next week. Two will be working on the website and one on marketing. And we have a contractor starting next week who will also be working on the site. This is a HUGE increase in resources. It is no longer just Stan:) We had to take care of lots of details to get them on board.
  
• We are preparing for our first contest. This is a major milestone - to hold our first student contest. We will need a basic website up and running, a cool idea for a contest, all the legal mumbo jumbo to hold the contest and advertising on a number of sites to attract students to participate. Lots left to do, but good progress on all fronts!
• Bringing on volunteers and providing some training. I have been working hard to sign up volunteers who let me know in the past that they were interested in helping. Those who are on board at this point are filling critical roles. And we still need more. This week was also about providing them with training on our mission, goals, roadmap, technology and so on.
  
• Continuing to progress with the platform. This week was about contacting a couple of design companies that will help us, researching user interface frameworks and digging through the many third party components. I am more and more convinced each day that Drupal was the right choice.
• And doing some nonprofit company stuff. We are a nonprofit but have not yet been approved as tax exempt. We spent some time understanding what is left to do. We also worked on the machine and business software and started researching insurance.

All in all, good progress. Still pretty nervous. Think that will be a constant for a while:)

Technology Decision

I mentioned in my post titled Planning - for announcement and launch about a week ago that "We made (mostly) our decision on platform technology." The remaining decision was around user interface technology. Well - we have now nailed this one. We will go with AJAX / PHP.

Note for my non technical readers - this is not Ajax the detergent:)

Stan Santiago will get into the details of all of this when he finally gets to writing his blog. But in short, we wanted to base our decision on open standards, with the largest and most active community, the most developers available and being trained, and which works best with Drupal.

We do have some work left to do. We need to decide which AJAX / PHP toolkit to use. There are lots of choices. There are of course differences in the capabilities provided and their tooling support, but the decision will not be a difficult one. We will make this quickly and move forward.

I am VERY VERY happy with this decision (as I am with our decision to go with Drupal)!!

Signing Up Volunteers

One of the biggest challenges that we have faced thus far is determining how to use the help of the many folks who have offered their time. This concept is completely foreign to what I have been doing for most of the last 20 years. But with nonprofits, it is. And with something as exciting and motivating as FreshBrain, the number of people who have offered their help has been awesome.

So the challenge has been what to do with them. We know that once FreshBrain is truly up and running and students are doing projects, we will need lots of volunteers to act as advisors. But outside of that - I hadn't spent any time thinking about what we could have volunteers do.

That all changed following the planning meetings that we had last week where we created the detailed schedule to get us to go live in January. It became very clear that we needed help to be successful. The most important roles that we need filled are community owners for the various technology areas.

The definition that I am using for a Technology Community is:

The set of people, content, projects, activities and training material that are tied together by a common interest or technology. There are a number of other communities that are a part of FreshBrain including unregistered users, registered users, parents, advisors, students, etc.. A technology community will include members from this larger set of communities.

The technology areas include:

• Gaming - all things related to video or computer games (single or multi player, first person, etc.), platforms that they run on (handset, pc, console, etc.) and technologies used to create them (flash, Java, etc.).
  
• Video / Movies - everything that you can do with video including creation, editing, merging / mashing, injection of ads or content and publishing
  
• Web (Community?, Ecommerce?) - the large set of things that you might do online including creating a website, social network, store, etc.
  
• Graphics (Design) - all things related to creating, editing, modifying and publishing of graphics (need to determine if this also includes pictures)
  
• Music - all things related to audio including creation, editing, merging / mashing, injection of ads or content and publishing
  
• Eco / Green - all things related to eco or green technology

This may all be a bit confusing, so let me try to explain it another way. As students peruse freshbrain.org exploring various technology areas, much of what they will see initially is information about that area, its different aspects, the kinds of technologies used and so on. As they get more and more interested, they will begin to participate in the community asking questions, reading blogs, looking at the kinds of projects that others are doing, and so on. And at some point they will decide to jump in and do something themselves.

This progression, the information that is available, the people that participate in the community, the projects and activities that they can complete and the technology that they will use will be defined and managed by the Technology Community owner.

I was successful in finding a number of technology community owners. I have Video / Movies, Web and Eco / Green covered. And I have good leads on Gaming and Graphics. That will be more than enough to get us to January.

I also found someone who is interested in helping us to run early testing with student groups. She has good technology experience, is a process person and is very passionate about the whole FreshBrain concept!!

We made good progress in a number of other areas. I will save them for another blog update:)