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We’re excited to bring Charity Makeover to Barcelona on November 9th. We’ll be updating this list as we add more local charities. If you have a local Barcelona-based nonprofit you’d like to nominate for us to support at the event please nominate them here.

The ones currently confirmed for the event are:

El Hogar Animal Sanctuary

Website: elhogar-animalsanctuary.org
Mission: Sanctuary for rehabilitating rescued and orphaned animals.
Backstory: The Hogar Animal Sanctuary is a non-profit organization that rescues and recovers animals victims of exploitation, educates in veganism and fights for Animal Rights and against specism. After more than twelve years of activity, the sanctuary has enabled the rescue, and subsequent accommodation in its facilities, of more than 200 animals facing a safe death in slaughterhouses or other extermination centers..
Current blockage: they’re currently currently wrestling with two main issues: 1) as a small, under-staffed team of volunteers working with data entered in Google Sheets they are heavily burdened with manual repetitive tasks like corresponding with volunteers to exchange info necessary to complete requisite paperwork for tax purposes 2) they are in the midst of moving the sanctuary to a new location and are facing one-time costs associated with preparing the new space and therefore are trying to bring more visitors to their site to increase donation volume and visibility of the project
What we’re doing about it: We’re investigating options for CRM systems and tools for streamlining their burdensome manual tasks into more automated workflow. They are keen to have a Drupal expert help them configure CiviCRM for this purpose. We are determining if that or some workflow with Gravity Forms on their WP website makes most sense or if there’s another donated CRM tool we can configure for them. We’ll be doing an SEO audit of their four web properties to determine what can be improved structurally to give them more visibility. As well they have Google Adwords for Nonprofits so we’ll be reviewing their adwords campaigns to optimize them for generating donors.
Who we need: Volunteer-wise we could use an SEO expert, SEM professional, potentially a Drupal guru with CiviCRM expertise, anyone with experience in process automation.

Esperança – Helping the Homeless

Website: https://www.facebook.com/esperanca.bcn/
Mission: Distribute donated food & basic needs items to homeless in Barcelona.
Backstory: They’ve been preparing food and handing it out along with other items like clothing, toiletries, etc weekly for six years in Barcelona. This is an entirely volunteer distributed decentralized organization organized via Facebook and Google Sheets that coordinate the pickup and distribution of food and items to homeless individuals living on the street.
Current blockage: there is a ton of organizational overhead associated with tracking what roles are unfilled and in need of volunteers each week, where the food is coming from, how it’s getting delivered, who is running which shifts, etc. Aside from exhausting all the free time of the leaders coordinating the efforts, it yields scenarios where teams are understaffed while some prospective volunteers never realize there’s an unserved need.
What we’re doing about it: We believe there’s opportunity to remove some of the administrative burden here and smooth out the attendance as well by implementing a simple cascading “pager duty” type app that automatically recruits and manages teams weekly and enables volunteers to confirm or reject participation each week. This should reduce stress of managing the process and potentially enable new routes to be run with the existing volunteer base.
Who we need: Developers, designers, UX/UI, ideally someone capable of setting up something like Open Joy or Skedge open source shift scheduling application that will feed their Google Sheet (or move their current process to AirTable and manage there). Still TBD on the implementation but we ideally need to cobble together the simplest possible mobile or web app that will solve their weekly organizational challenges.

SEEDs for Autism

Website: seedsforautism.org
Mission: Vocational training and social development for young adults with autism in Phoenix, Arizona.
Backstory: SEEDs is a project started by Mary Ann LaRoche nine years ago in her backyard years ago and has grown into a full-time operation serving 65+ young adults with autism in Phoenix, AZ. They give vocational training, a social outlet and a career path to people who otherwise tend to struggle to find their place after high school.
Current blockage: they’re currently wrestling with two issues needing: 1) an inventory system to track the goods their participants are creating and selling online & via physical events 2) a donor relationship management system to communicate with the people who donate to support their organization.
What we’re doing about it: We’re intending to divide this team in two and have half the team working to research open source inventory management solutions and free CRM solutions that can be repurposed to communicate with donors. The other half of the team will be implementing donated licenses of GiveWP and Reply App to pursue a strategy of developing a recurring scholarship program fundraising initiative for their participants which would enable an ongoing revenue stream that would support hiring a contract IT person to help with their ongoing, evolving IT needs.
Who we need: Volunteer-wise we’re looking for people with general WordPress experience (any prior experience with GiveWP would be huge but not essential), copy writers, volunteers with general skills necessary to research the options and present findings on the sought after solutions and ideally a direct-response email marketer who can setup Reply App.

Lisbon Project

Website: LisbonProject.org
Mission: Help protect and integrate refugees and migrants in Lisbon.
Backstory: They’ve been around for 2+ years and aim to supplement the governmental efforts for aiding refugees by providing the missing community response portion.
Current blockage: They recently succeeded in getting their van (yay) but are struggling to make updates to their Weebly website and also looking for help better telling the story of their donation/sponsor program.
What we’re doing about it: This will be the first ever dual-city Charity Makeover (Lisbon & Barcelona running concurrently). Lisbon team will be building upon what we started with the sponsorship kit and fundraising initiative. Barcelona team will be porting their Weebly website to WordPress and working to put together an animated piece to explain these programs.
Who we need: Volunteer-wise Lisbon team could use general help, copywriting and anyone who has done fundraising in the past. Barcelona team could use copy writers, an animator or graphic designer who has created motion graphics before and anyone proficient with WordPress to assist with the migration from Weebly.

Proyecto Caraya

Website: Caraya.org
Mission: recover, rehabilitate and repatriate orphaned howler monkeys displaced by the blackmarket pet trade in Argentina.
Backstory: they’ve been in operation for 25 years as a family-run nonprofit and currently house 120+ monkeys. They’re entirely volunteer-based and donation-funded and seeking to acquire land in northern Argentina to be able to release the rehabilitated monkeys into the wild in a safe environment.
Current blockage: they have no in-house technical expertise and while we were able to implement a website, CRM, accounting package and crowdfunding platform for them in our last effort, they get little traffic and donations currently.
What we’re doing about it: We see an opportunity to jumpstart their visibility and fundraising efforts by executing a competitive donation drive contest across the alumni network of the Remote Year program.
Who we need: PHP developer with MySQL experience for implementing the necessary tracking and leaderboard to facilitate the contest, copy writer, UX/UI designer to polish the contest donor experience, ideally an ActiveCampaign CRM automation expert to wire up sensible followup sequences and create a viral element to the contest.

What you’ll get by participating

  • Meet fellow badasses You’ll work in a team along-side other brilliant people who have skill sets peripheral to your own. You’ll be mixing with a variety of interesting professionals who all bring a unique background of expertise and experience.
  • Learn new skills You will likely get exposed to some novel ideas and even pick up a few new useful skills over the course of the weekend. This is your opportunity to put what you know to work for a good cause but also to absorb the knowledge of others who are doing the same.
  • Fulfillment You’ll see first-hand the fruits of your labor and the gratitude of the charities we’re helping when we present the final product on Sunday evening. Rarely do we get to deliver a functional finished project in such short order and be able to hug the beneficiary of our efforts.
  • Resumé material Bolster your CV by listing the fact that you participated in this pro-bono volunteer experience. Employers love seeing applicants who contribute and go the extra mile for personal betterment via events like Charity Makeover.
  • Free food and various goodies Meals will be provided throughout the weekend. We also have some freebie giveaways from sponsors and there’s occasionally even been a surprise visit from standout business mentors in the local community.

We can take a max of 25 in-person participants. Apply for your spot now:

Apply for a ticket

To get more of a flavor of what the event itself is like see video, picture and a writeup from our last event in Cordoba, Argentina. If you’re unable to make this next event but would like to be kept informed of future events tell us about your skills here and we’ll keep you posted on future events.