Care to create

to those who need it desperately.

Networking with creative people is the best. How else would I have been able to connect with folks like those I met during the Southern Fried Designathon, self titled by the famous @JessicaRMurray? Three organizations: The Collaboratory; Geek for Good; and The Social Media Club joined forces and asked their members to spend 24 hours utilizing their talents for a worthy nonprofit, Youthturns, an organization that serves the families of prisoners to help mentor and educate youth so that they don’t take the same path to prison as their parents.

Having some success with these kinds of events (CreateAthon), I was asked to be the Creative Director for the shindig and I gladly accepted – staying up all night with a bunch of creative people doing branding…hell yeah!

After some pre-planning meetings the CoLab of Nashville graciously donated their space and off we went.

At 11am on a Saturday, we began with a compelling story by Andy Dixon, the founder of Youthturns. His journey and dedication to helping America’s youth break the cycle of generational incarceration is really why we organized this whole event. This allowed everyone who just showed up with their sleeping bags to get caught up with whom they were about to feverishly work so hard and understand their mission.

With teams of writers, marketers, videographers, photographers, designers, web developers and PR folks – over 30 people in all, we were a force to be reckoned with. Led by three coordinators: leaders of the Collaboratory; Geek for Good; The Social Media Club and myself, we marched through the night with a plan. Helped by team leads and plenty of donated caffeine, we accomplished executing a tremendous branding campaign that was delivered to the founders of Youthturns by 11am the following morning. Including a new logo, brochure, letterhead and business cards, marketing strategy, 5-minute Ignite presentation, video package, a handbook for prison families, social media connections and a new Website.

We even had a visit from the Nashville Fire Dept. and Police after a fire Alarm went off at 5am! It definitely woke us up and got us fired up to complete the event. –Pun intended.

Taking advantage of social media, we made sure we used all our existing twitter accounts and streamed the entire event live via ustream so that others could follow us. Not to mention that our promo video received over 72,000 views within the first 20 minutes on our website – all because of our dedication to using social connections online. You can visit our facebook page or our twitter account and or hash-tag – #designathon to catch all the antics that transpired through the night.

We were able to pull some media exposure from 3 different local news networks, These links will show the news video captured at the event. WTVF, WKRN, WSMV.

The cool thing is that we could do it again. With lessons learned, evolving leadership and creative recruiting, the power behind planned, focused crowdsourcing done within a short time frame can be very effective. After doing this kind of event three times now, choosing one non-profit is definitely the way to go. I’ve worked on 16 brands in one night before – you can’t give brands everything they need in that situation.

This experience was amazing. Helping people who can’t afford marketing and desperately need it to get funding to start their worthy cause makes you realize that maybe your talents are meant for something other than accolades. Creativity is meant to be shared – sometimes in a big way.