I had the distinct pleasure of joining Seattle GiveCamp again this year. For those of you who do not know, Seattle GiveCamp is an organization that puts on an annual weekend hackathon in support of local non-profits. 

This year, Seattle GiveCamp 2019 supported 10 non-profits (see the list here) and there were about 100 volunteers, and one bunny!

WordPress has definitely grown in favor over the years. The majority of projects were WordPress, with one ASP.net, a couple Wix, and one Squarespace. I provided assistance to most of the WordPress based projects, but my main focus was Transplant House.

Transplant House (LINK) provides move in ready apartments to individuals getting transplants. Housing in Seattle is in short supply and they provide a vital service wherein transplantees do not have hunt around and sign a long contract on a place to live. They are already worried about enough with the transplant! 

While many of the projects were sprucing up websites, Transplant House has a large technical need. They had been operating entirely manually, with spreadsheets and paper processes. Their ask was for an automated process that took in guest applications and walked them all the way through the interview process, to apartment booking, to checkout and billing. It was a big ask for a weekend project, but my team NAILED IT!

The team was not too familiar with WordPress, but we figured out a workflow and everyone pitched in- lots of learning took place. The team naturally split itself into: developer, project manager/QA, data scientists, form creation specialists. Yes, we had fun with our titles! In the end we not only delivered a working solution, but also pages of user documentation, roadmap for improvements, video documentation, and walked through it with Transplant House several times to ensure it met their needs.

Transplant House is thrilled with their new system. I am excited to hear in a few weeks as to how it is working out for them.

I cannot wait until next year. If you are in Seattle, join us in 2020! You do not have to be technical, there are lots of non-developers tasks to go around.