360Conferences

On top of giving back to the commnity, Tom and I decided that we needed to show our appreciation, on a smaller scale, at the person level. We decided to start the MVP program just after we got back from Atlanta and Milan. Nick Kwiatkowski and Michael Labriola really stepped up and helped us out. They did so for no other reason than to help.

Upon reflecting on that help we realized that each of our events had an MVP: someone from the community that went above and beyond any expectations. Either with guidance in business, logistical help negotiating the Adobe landscape, or helping us burn USB drives, or acting as translator for us in Italy, helping smooth out some of our harrier international incidents :)

To quickly recap from our Wednesday keynote from San Jose '08:

• San Jose '07 - Ted Patrick. Ted was an orginal founder and was instrumental in getting this ball rolling.
• Seattle - Ed Sullivan - Our man on the inside of Adobe; Eddie helped us find the right people to talk to for whatever problem we had. He helped us not go crazy dealing with the Adobe corporate machine. We love you Adobe employees, it's just the machine that gets in the way sometimes.
  
• Atlanta - Nick Kwaitkowski - Nick helped us burn USB drives and man the registration desk. We were admittedly a bit unprepared and Nick helped us not look completely lame.
• Milan - Michael Labriola - Mike helped us a TON. His Italian mighta been rusty, but our Italian was corrosive, so Mike was a god send when dealing with registration issues. Plus he was instrumental in ordering dinner without nasty looks. :)
• San Jose '08 - David Bigelow - Dave is possibly an unlikely source of business knowledge for us, since most of his advice directly impacts him as a sponsor. That said, he's been the closest thing to a mentor in business Tom and I have had, and we're hoping that relationship (as well as the organizer/sponsor one) continues to grow and flourish. Dave has opened our eyes to a lot of business realities we had overlooked. 

Thanks you guys!!!!

We wish we could do more, but hopefully the cheesy plastic trophies and Olympic-like medals show how much we appreciate you more than words can :) Plus you can defend against ninjas with them, which has to be worth something.

The Bowling League shirts are worth something though, so we'll have to get together and play a few games.

Back before we were profitable as a company, we made a promise:

20% of all future profits of our shows will be given back.  10% will be given back to the community which the conference serves and 10% will go towards making the world a better place.

It's easy to pledge money when you don't have it.  It's quite another thing to follow through when you do.  Money has all sorts of effects on people and sadly most of the effects are not good.  We think that a lot of these issues would be solved if some of the profits were given back. It's hard to be greedy and all about money, when you give back and see the fruits of the generosity.

At our most recent 360|Flex event in San Jose last month, this was the breakdown:

Community 10% -  We gave over $9,000 in tickets to Flex User Groups.  In addition, we're buying a PlayStation 3 as the prize for the OpenFlux competition.  That's more than 10%, but who's counting. :)

World 10% - We gave $7,000 to Second Harvest Food Bank and $1,000 in prizes to those that helped with the Charity Flex Code Jam.  The code jam built a "hot meal locator" application (search for zip code: 95117) for Second Harvest.  Ali Daniali led the effort, we provided the hotel room and conference space.

Second Harvest wrote this in regards to our donations:

Another huge thank you for the most generous gift you presented us with today.  Your gift of $7,000 will help us buy enough food to provide at least 14,000 meals for low income people in need.  That’s a lot of hunger relief!

Your gift will change lives this month and into the fall.  Again, thank you for your partnership.

And thank you for all of the programming and developer hours that went into creating the application for our call center to become available after-hours. That is something we have been dreaming about for years. Many of our food recipients work during the day and can’t easily, or discreetly, call the Food Connection hotline to ask for food assistance between the hours of 8:00 a.m. and 4:30 p.m.  Now there is a solution.

I would love to talk with you more about your company’s philosophy of giving back – I welcome the opportunity to learn about excellent ideas, as it ads to my arsenal of thoughts to share with other like-minded companies.

To be able to provide that was truly an honor for John and myself. We were both surprised by just how good it felt to give back.  To be honest, it felt way better than becoming "profitable" as a company.

We share this info, not to pat ourselves on the back.  Let's not kid ourselves here, $7K is but a tiny drop in a global sized bucket of needed relief.  We do it instead for two reasons.

First, we want to challenge you and your business to do the same.  You can match our $7K donation to the Second Harvest Food Bank (email info@360flex.com if you do).  More importantly though, we'd challenge you to match the '10% back to make the world better' pledge.  You may have your reasons on why that isn't possible, but to be honest we don't want to hear 'em.  It's a challenge because challenges are hard, not easy.  If it was easy, there wouldn't be much of a challenge now would there?

Second, if you came to 360|Flex, this donation is every bit because of you.  Much like how John and I are merely the messengers for 360|Flex, we're just the messengers here as well.  The $7K was a portion of all the funds you gave to us, funds that you entrusted us to do the right thing with: Put on a good show and make good on our promises.

Hopefully, as time goes on, we'll be able to increase our contributions.  John and I will likely not change the world all by ourselves, but every little bit helps.  Plus, if we can inspire others to do the same, we get that much closer.