Posted by Justin McDowell on August 19, 2009 under Analysis, Notsocommon Ventures | 
This is the second post of a two part blog series on some exciting news and future blog topics
Welcome to The Resume Lounge
After much delay, I am proud to announce the second piece of news. True to my word, you are going to get some inside access into The Resume Lounge as we start up and get our sea legs. So let’s start from the beginning:
We are Getting Real at The Resume Lounge, and that is already paying dividends operationally and philosophically.
We started on this journey realizing that even though our core team is located in the metro Atlanta area, our schedules would still lend towards working independently. Members of our core team all have full time jobs so we tend to burn the midnight oil, or rise early in the morning to work a couple of hours on the project. Therefore remote collaboration is essential to our success. Price is also a big deal. We are a non-profit and my default answer when it comes to spending my time or money is NO. I knew from the very beginning that we needed to be as laser focused on our mission and our tools needed little to no maintenance and needed to get out of our way. Lastly, none of us are using the same hardware and software. These requirements naturally lend itself to the notion that we needed a web office. We simply don’t have time to manage all of this ourselves, we have people to help. So without further ado here are some of the tools we are using to get things our work done:
Balsamiq Mockups – We use this extremely useful and flexible tool to mock up designs for our website and collaborate with our designers and developers. It makes my life at The Resume Lounge easier. I sent an email to Valerie Liberty at Balsamiq explaining what we are about. In 10 minutes Valerie sent us a free license. We can’t thank you enough Valerie (our thank you letter is in the mail)!!! Follow her on Twitter, she has interesting things to say.
Backpack – This serves as our company intranet and group scheduling calendar. We store all of our appointments, legal documents, our board of directors meetings minutes, our expense receipts, our staff meetings…. etc all. Anytime we need a quick webpage created or a quick to do list thrown up that isn’t worthy of a formal “project”, we put it in there.
Basecamp – We need a simple and flexible collaboration tool to help us with project management. It keeps us on the same page and soon we will roll this out to our partners and sponsors so we can keep track of what they have going on. It truly lives up to its motto “The Better Way To Get Projects Done.”
Highrise – is a dead simple customer relationship management tool. It helps James and I keep track of who we talked too and what was said. We need to keep track of our open deals (they might be pledged donors that we need to follow up with, a proposal for services that we will need to pay a third party vendor for, or corporate sponsorships) and if they were won or lost.
Gmail – We use gmail for our email platform, and Google Talk for our instant messaging capability. We occasionally use Google Docs.
MailChimp – We use MailChimp to create and track our email marketing efforts. There automagic integration with Highrise and attractive price point (including a discount for non profits:) made this an extremely easy decision. It saves me time and takes one problem completely off the table. The analytics and reporting really helps us slice and dice our target markets.
We are in the process of evaluating web accounting software, because for us Quickbooks isn’t an option. Right now Less Accounting is the front runner.
What other web office tools do you recommend?
– Justin McDowell
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Posted by Justin McDowell on July 30, 2009 under Notsocommon Ventures |
This will be a two part blog series on some exciting news and future blog topics
As you can see Mikal and I have been grappling with this notion of aligning our personal and professional goals to fundamentally engage and help people in a transformational way. Every day on the news we hear about the meltdown in our financial markets and the grim housing market reports. Many of my friends and business associates have lost their jobs and health insurance at a time when they can least afford it. I can no longer sit idle in good faith and conscience and watch as unemployment hovers near 10%. I feel compelled to take immediate action.
Today I would like to announce that I am boldly taking a first step.
I have partnered with a very good friend, James Augustus Jr, to form The Resume Lounge, and we have been running dark for some time…
The Resume Lounge is a grassroots 501 (c) (3) non-profit organization that offers donation based resume education to job seekers who wish to advance their careers. The organization was founded in 2009 to tackle the underlying cause of unemployment across the nation, deficient resumes. As the national unemployment rate nears double digits, this growing problem has given way to mass
confusion and frustration.
It is hard enough to look for a job in the best of situations, but many people and their families are hurting. Trying to search for a job without knowing the basic rules of crafting an accurate, value-based resume, can make an already tough situation seem impossible.
Our goal is to help people facing tough economic realities by educating them on how to create a competitive resume. This often neglected document holds the key to boosting a job seeker’s confidence, opening the door to more opportunities, and taking them from a once ‘impossible’ situation to a place of hope.
We only want to bite off what we can chew, and in this case it is helping people better compete with an effective resume. If you would like to help you can do so in many different ways.
- Donate! Your donation helps us help more and more people get professionally re-written resumes. Consider that for-profit services usually cost anywhere from $100 -$600 per resume. In these difficult economic times many people simply can’t afford this. As always, all donations are tax deductible.
- Volunteer! We need all sorts of help, we can’t do this alone. We can use resume writers, designers, copy writers, recruiters, corporate sponsorships, and social media help. Fill out the contact form and we will get back to you.
- Spread the Word! Follow us on Twitter, join our Facebook Group, attend our events, network, and be informed.
Now for the notsocommoncents perspective. I will be periodically blogging about our successes and our struggles as a small non-profit startup. I’ll be sure to highlight all aspects of our operation, and will probably pay special attention to the social media aspects of community building for a specific cause. Sprints and Marathons indeed.
- Justin F. McDowell
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Posted by Mikal Lewis on May 4, 2009 under Uncategorized |
“Life is often compared to a marathon, but I think it is more like being a sprinter; long stretches of hard work punctuated by brief moments in which we are given the opportunity to perform at our best”
- Michael Johnson
Priority 1
So we’ve done it. We’ve disturbed inertia and finally have notsocommoncents up and running again. Great. Except now we need to rebuild traffic. But to get traffic we must have content – and to get content takes time.
I do know that I’m not alone in this struggle.
I’m honest enough with myself to know that I don’t blog frequently enough to compete with other blogs for the daily news cycles or even worst – hype cycle; in fact the hyper news cycle and blogosphere ADD were things I took issue with during my first foray into blogging.
So I’ve decided to take a different route this time, instead of focusing on the current news topics of the day. I’ll most often swim in the exact opposite direction. As a DJ – I dug in the crates of my record collection (and record shops) to find hidden gems that I can introduce to a new audience. As an author I’ll do the same. Reading and digging through journals and business profiles both past and present (because lessons should transcend time) to mine information and nuggets to present back to you my reader.
I aim to do one solid post a week.
Since priority one is increasing readership – we’ll have to see if this works we’ll enough to garner links, or even captivating enough to keep your attention.
Over the next few weeks, I’ll be sprinting through a marathon of projects that have come from all angles. In addition to updating this blog with Justin and Brandon, I’ll be updating our twitter with business nuggets each day, and I’m lined up as a guess author on The Ideators Journey. Who knows maybe more projects coming soonish.
Some questions Im thinking about regarding increasing blog traffic. Outside of reciprocal links what are your tips? Outside of daily business news – what type of content do you find compelling?
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