There are over 350 non-profits in Santa Barbara County with hundreds of Executive Directors, Board Members, Staff and Volunteers yet there was no private, secure way to make connections between each other easily. The Hutton Parker Foundation wanted to create an online resource to replace the physical building that was used to provide help to local non-profits. In addition, they wanted to focus on capacity building and helping all aspects of the non-profit community. Board members are frequently civilians and don’t know what’s expected of them. Staffers need to find peers in other organizations to be able to solve problems quickly. Executive Directors need a place where they can ask questions and find help with specific challenges. Volunteers use the site to build profiles of what they are interested in, so that the organizations can search for specific people to place on working groups and committees. introNetworks worked closely with a strategic team to tune the Visual Matching Engine to meet the exact requirements of this unique community. The four dimensions that the Community is matched on are: Passions/Focus (Things like Youth, Family Care, The Arts) My Interests (Concepts like Big idea, Fitness, Learning….) , How I can Help (Specifics such as Team Player, Critical Thinking, Idea Generation), and I need Help With (Areas of Focus include: Grant Writing. Building a Board, Marketing Strategy and other concerns). With NPRN the non-profits are able to:

Learn about non-profit news & opportunities
Community Calendar, by Group and Organization in one view
Connect with fellow staff, executives & board members and volunteers
Find valuable resources & information
Share knowledge to raise the level of competency across all organizations
Discover the people, the passion & purpose of the local nonprofit community

This Community has the advantage of a dedicated outside Community Awareness and Marketing firm that specializes in non-profits. LOAcom produces a weekly newsletter, encourages and stimulates engaging conversations and works closely with the foundation to call attention to trending topics, areas of interest and places when the foundation can help the community. There is a complete back-end reporting capability of the Community that is used on a regular basis to assess the needs (I Need Help With) and where the experts are (I Can Help With) as the Foundation and others in the Community are planning educational outreach programs, seminars and workshops. LOAcom created a landing page for NPRN so that community members could easily find the site and tell their friends and colleagues about it.

The Non-Profit Resource Network Overview Guide

The local online newspaper, Noozhawk, covered the launch of the site here and one of the funding partners, the Santa Barbara Foundation featured it in this story.