There is no doubt there will be one for 2013, given that this was rated to be one of the best SharePoint Saturday events ever.  Many thanks to Jim Bob and Matt who did a stellar job of putting together a real classy event and setting the bar for other events.

My part in this production went very well also.  My session, SharePoint Group Therapy (A SharePoint Governance Workshop), while lightly attended (hey, I was up against Bill English, and if I hadn’t been speaking I would have been in his session too!) was highly regarded by the attendees present.  So much so that I have decided to launch SharePointTherapist.com.

The idea is to replicate, as best as possible on the web, the collaborative environment of the workshop where anyone can bring their SharePoint issues and questions and get answers from myself and anyone else in the community who wants to participate.  Unlike other existing venues, this will be focused around governance issues rather than technical ones. 

So if you have problems in your current environment, fears about implementing governance, or fears about implementing SharePoint, bring them to the SharePoint Therapist.

I’m also planning on taking my session on the road to other SharePoint Saturdays and other SharePoint events.

I apologize for any inconvenience that you suffer because you are unable to read the promised goodies on my site that teh interwebz have promised you and tantalized you with via whatever search engine caused you to find my blog.

I’ll be back the 19th.

As the saying goes (at least here in the US), “Had this been an actual emergency,” there would be no guarantee that the site would return a day later.

In brief, the SOPA law would allow the takedown of any website accused of copyright violation, without due process. No one would need to prove that an actual violation had occurred, the accusation itself would be enough. While I am careful to give credit where it is due (after all, I don’t live in a vacuum, and while my ideas are sometimes clever, the are often rooted in work someone else has done), and to honor the copyrights of others, any site is vulnerable if this misguided law is enacted.

Copyright violations are a real problem, but SOPA is not a real solution.

Here endeth the SOPA soapbox.

In November the speaker lineup for SharePoint Saturday Austin was announced, and I was fortunate enough to have made the cut.  I had submitted two topic proposals, but there were som many great speakers that wanted to present at SharePoint Saturday Austin that each speaker was limited to a single presentation. 

So I left it up to you, my readers, to decide which topic you would rather see. 

The voting has been close, but one topic did finally pull ahead.  So now here is the topic I will be presenting January 21 at SharePoint Saturday Austin:

SharePoint Group Therapy (A SharePoint Governance Workshop)

This session is intended for Business stakeholders and SharePoint administrators. 

Do your users complain about the usability of your SharePoint?  Do you suffer from site proliferation?  Rights management issues?  Content inaccuracy and staleness?  Can you easily tell who owns the content of a particular site or list?  Do you have rogue SharePoint servers in your environment?  Is your SharePoint out of control?

Then you might benefit from SharePoint Group Therapy.

At the very least, this session will give you a free hour of group therapy, as you will have a chance to vent about your (SharePoint) problems in a roomful of sympathetic listeners.

I’ll play therapist and help move participants past their trauma and regain a sense of control through Governance.

This session is structured as a workshop, with participants interacting with each other in what should be a lively, opinionated discussion of what SharePoint Governance should be, and how it should work. 

Since the goal of therapy is to actually make things better, you should bring your questions about SharePoint Governance and aligning your business objectives with SharePoint, and I’ll try to help you get answers.

• What problems are you having in your current environment?
• What fears do you have about implementing governance?
• What fears do you have about implementing SharePoint?

Participants should be prepared to share personal experiences with SharePoint governance and its absence.  We’ll talk about roles and responsibilities, stakeholder involvement, and fitting your organizational culture. We’ll also talk about changing your organizational culture using both carrots and sticks – training, enforcement and business alignment.

Business alignment can be seen as the marriage of IT and business objectives.  Every marriage has its rocky moments, and sometimes a therapist is needed to resolve those issues.  Perhaps your marriage could benefit from a little SharePoint Group Therapy?

So there you have it.  Thanks to everyone for your input, and I’ll see you next Saturday!

Specifically, your year, and how you plan to manage your career in the year ahead.

As the old saw goes, “Failure to plan is planning to fail.”  So I am asking you to not plan to fail.

Whether or not you are currently employed, you should look at your employment, your employment history, skills, professional activities and job searches as pieces of a whole, your career.  You need a strategy to manage your career.  Here’s why, and some ideas how…

Years ago the word “career” meant a job with a single company that included the potential for moving up the company ladder, with increasing skills, responsibility, and compensation, an employment relationship that would last your professional life.  At most, you might change companies once or twice, but you would stay in the same field and on the same ladder or progression.

Needless to say, this paradigm is no longer in effect for the vast majority of today’s workforce.  You have had more employers in the last ten years than people a generation or two ago had in their entire careers.  You are either looking for work now, or you will be within a few short years.  If you aren’t being pushed out the door as the company restructures its workforce yet again, you will likely be looking at another employer to be able to move up that ladder.

Instead of seeing ourselves as “job seekers”, we are to see ourselves as “skills holders”, possessing something of value that employers will want to make use of, even if only for a short period of time.  But in order to make the new paradigm work for you, you need to manage your career, you need a strategy to do so effectively.

Here are a few things for you to consider about your career management strategy:

1. Networking
2. Community
3. Self-Promotion

In our careers we mostly put our effort into skills, because it is so easy to see the value of doing so.  We take classes to beef up our skills.  We spend time on our resumes, determining the best way to describe our skills.  We spend time practicing our pitches, our answers to interview questions, to verbalize how we have used our skills.  When we are employed, we work hard to demonstrate our skills.

But if it were just about our skills, we could queue up and take a number, based on our skills level and/or our duration of unemployment, wait in line and when our number came up we’d have a job.  But its not just about our skill level.

Part of the interview process is intended to evaluate how well you will fit in at the company.  Unless you know the hiring manager personally, they will still want to have that opportunity to make that evaluation for themselves.  But there are ways to improve your chances, by creating a presumption that you will fit in even before you walk into the interview.  This is where the three considerations come in.

The first way is networking.  Networking is taking advantage of the fact that you know people, as well as getting to know new people.  Pretty straightforward, really.  If you have an existing relationship with someone at a company that needs someone like you, and that someone puts in a good word for you, you have the advantage of the presumption that you will fit in.

Networking starts with the people you already know – your family and friends, co-workers and former co-workers.  These are the people who know you the best, people you have already established relationships with.  They are your first line of defense against unemployment.  make sure your connections with these people are current, that yo have touched base with them, had some sort of recent interaction, and then maintain that with regular interactions – with Facebook, LinkedIn, other social media, e-mails, phone calls, or conversation over coffee.  A “well-oiled” network is key to both hearing about opportunities to move your career forward, and to building that presumption before you go for the interview.

For some, this can feel difficult, because these are the people you have an investment in, and asking for help or talking about your current situation if you are currently unemployed can make you feel vulnerable.  But I cannot express how valuable these connections are for you.

With the advent of Facebook and other social media, general understanding of the term “networking” has now grown to include these established relationships.  But there is also the part of networking that people generally have associated with the term “networking” – going out to some venue and meeting with people you don’t yet know, talking about who you are and what you do and exchanging contact information, often int he form of business cards.  However, what is important about traditional networking is not the exchange of contact information (though that part is necessary in order to be able to contact each other), but instead the establishment of  connection.

How you establish and use those connections are more tactical decisions than strategic.  For now I want you to consider the value of an insider on your side the next time you are looking to advance your career.  While I do think that claims for the so-called “hidden job market” tend to be overblown, there are  opportunities that you will never see without someone on the inside.

The second is community.  I’ve talked about community before. Your professional community is made up of people in your career field, and can be a great place to network.  Your personal communities (your neighborhood, church, your kid’s scout troop, and so on) are similarly rewarding places to network.  You already have things in common with the members of your community, that is part of what community is - people grouped together by common interests, activities, location, values, and experiences.  This makes your community a valuable part of your network.  But there is more community than commonality…

The other thing that makes community is the contribution to a common goal, even if there is no (immediate) benefit for the contributor.  By being a contributor to your community (professional or personal), you increase the value of the community for everyone, yourself included.  When you create value in your community, your community will value you more.  Employers want nothing more than someone who can create value for them.Every time you demonstrate you can create value, you demonstrate your employability.

The final thing I want you to consider is self-promotion.  “If you build it they will come…”  Well, maybe, but they sure are more likely to if you advertise it.  Become comfortable talking about your accomplishments; have a web presence that talks about your skills, abilities, and successes for you even when you aren’t online.  Blogs (helooooo!), websites, twitter, and other social media can be very powerful ways to let potential employers know about you.

As you prepare to meet the New Year, give some thought to your career strategy.

Jim Adcock is Vice President of Launch Pad Job Club, an organization in Austin, Texas, whose mission is help people who have lost their jobs to get the skills they need to land their next job, and to help them cope with the interim between jobs. Check out other career-related entries.

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

I’ve talked about how the existing environment was a mess.  Rather than upgrade the mess, our strategic decision was to use a third-party migration product to copy the relevant portions of existing environment into the new, better-organized one, putting things where they out to belong.

While our content database isn’t particularly large, this isn’t going to happen overnight, or even over a weekend.  There is an awful lot of mess to clean up.

So we are going to do it a baby step at a time. But that means there are tactical decisions that need to be made to allow the users to get their work done in the meantime…

We determined that we wanted users to start on the new site, and then, if the content they needed was still on the old site, they would go there to find it.  They are going to have to use the new site eventually, better to get them used to navigating to the content via the new site now so when it moves they won’t be looking in the wrong place.  So the first problem to resolve was getting user buy-in for the new site, even though most of the content is still on the old site.

In our case, the carrot to motivate use is the much-desired new search functionality. Everyone hated SharePoint 2007′s search – there was no wildcard search, and with poor governance, relevant information was buried in the results. By crawling the content still stored on the old SharePoint site with the new SharePoint search, a “search first” approach to migration, the users will migrate even before the content does because users can get better search results even before the content is migrated.

The next issue was navigation. If some stuff is here, and some stuff is there, how are we going to direct our users where they need to go?  We were lucky with this issue, though, as it simultaneously addressed one of the issues we had with the old site’s main page and navigation.

In addition to a load of links to the top two tiers of sites on the left side of the page and a long list of links in a web part on the right, our old home page had flyout menus with sub-levels and sub-sub levels and… well, you get the picture.  There were nearly 200 links on the front page.

We tackled this in several ways.  First, we had individual meetings with a number of representative users to determine which links were most commonly used by everyone.  Then we had them sort the important links into related groups, or “buckets”, and then asked them to name those buckets.  When all was said and done, we had 40 links divided into five categories.  The top five overall most important links were added on the left side.

We also created three other links for that section – a link back to the old site (which will be removed when the migration is complete), a feedback form for users to tell us what isn’t working (and what is working) for them on the new site, and a Site Directory.

The site directory is a web part page with two views of a list – grouped “By Department” (with the groups collapsed), and an “Alphabetical” listing of all of the sites.  The list contains a friendly name and a URL for each site, as well as the name of the department that the site falls under.

If you remember from my governance post, one of our struggles was with the number of sites that had been created - there were more sites than employees! So how to easily create a list with all of the sites?

http://site/_vti_bin/Enum.aspx displays a list of all of the sites formatted as XML. I saved the XML file, then opened it in Excel. The Excel file has seven columns, but there are only two columns I was interested in – URL2 and the title, columns C and D. To create the hyperlink field with a friendly name, I created the following formula:

=HYPERLINK(C2,D2)

I added a column with the Department Name information, and quickly copied-and-pasted my way through the list with the eight departments (pretty easy, since the old site was set up hierarchically by department).

There were two ways to import the information. One was to import the spreadsheet (after deleting the extraneous columns). The other was to manually create the list, with columns Title, Site and Department. Title and Department are Single line of text columns, Site is a Hyperlink column. Once the list is created, open the list in Datasheet view, copy the three columns from Excel and paste into the datasheet.  I chose Door #2 because I am a bit of a control freak and wanted to make sure the columns had been set up correctly the first time.

The list will be manually updated to point to the new site location on the new SharePoint once the site has been migrated.

So now we have an easy way to get to the most important stuff, and a way to get to a list of everything else with one click.

Gee, that should cover just about everything, right?  If you think that, you are forgetting the bane of every IT plan… users.

Don’t get me wrong.  Users are why the system exists, if you don’t mind me quoting TRON.  But users do things for their own convenience that will cause them endless trouble if you don’t take them into account.  And when users have trouble, they complain, and fail to appreciate the hard work you have put in to make their lives easier.

Take, for instance, bookmarks (or favorites, or shortcuts, or saved links, etc).  Users want to get to the stuff they use the fastest and easiest way possible, so often (especially when your navigation is a mess) they save a link to their stuff as a bookmark, or a favorite, or a shortcut, or whatever.  What do you think will happen when you have moved their stuff?  Instead of getting their stuff, they will get an error message.  “Where is my stuff?!?!  I hate I.T.!  I hate SharePoint!”

Now, we can’t realistically build a custom redirect for every item and page in the old site, especially when so much of it is no longer relevant.  Plus, if we do that, they won’t update their bookmark, and will really scream when the old system is finally taken down for good.  Somewhere between a 404 File Not Found and a custom redirect is a simple way to ease users to their content and to motivate them to update their saved links.

Enter the Custom 404 message.

Pretty simple in IIS, but SharePoint throws in a wrinkle or two.  Fortunately, others have been down this path before me, so all I had to do was create the page (which looks a lot like our new SharePoint site, and includes links to the new site and a message to update their bookmarks!) and follow these instructions.

And, no, we’re still not done.  So many details to attend to!  There is still displaying the news from the new site on the front page of the old site, training users, oh and actually migrating all of the stuff!  With over 1200 words already, it sounds like an article for next week!  Stay tuned!

More posts about SharePoint.

Well I can dream, can’t I?

As mentioned in the site description slug (under my picture to the right), in my guidance post, and in my Manifesto (of sorts) (and probably about a dozen other places on this blog), I am both a SharePoint administrator and a board member of a nonprofit that helps people become re-employed after losing their job. Some of my posts on this blog are about SharePoint, and some are about career management.

As part of my role in giving career management advice, I strongly encourage people to be involved with professional organizations, or to start one if there isn’t one in their area. As a SharePoint professional, I am a member of two area SharePoint user groups (one in Austin and one in San Antonio), as well as an attendee (and onetime board member) of other local technology organizations.  I’ve helped organize events, I’ve given presentations, and just plain volunteered to help set up, clean up, or do whatever was needed.  I also help other local organizations by promoting their meetings and events, even organizations whose technology focus is outside the range of my field.  I’ve seen a number of ways that organizations meet the needs of the members of their communities.

What I’d like to do is get your input about what the organizations that you are involved in or know of do to support their professional communities (regardless of whether that community is technical or not).  How is the group organized, what kinds of activities does it engage in, and what have you found to be the most effective of its activities?

While the primary reason I want to have this discussion is to learn how to make the groups I am involved in better able to serve the communities I’m involved in, I also would like this discussion to benefit you and the groups you are involved in as well. 

Here are a broad outline of the types of (in-person) activities I have seen:

• Group organizer(s) determine the topic(s), find a presenter, sets everything up, the members show up at the appointed time, eat some food and listen to the presentation and then go home.  This happens once a month.
• Unconference style – the members show up with their ideas ready to present, the members vote on which topic(s) they would like to hear, and the selected topic(s) are presented.
• Meetup – networking and conversation, over food and/or drinks 
• Multi track – the monthly meeting has two (or more) different presentations, but you have to pick one
• Multi subject – the meeting has two (or more) presentations done serially
• Multi-meeting – the group has more than one meeting a month, (perhaps in different parts of town to accommodate members who live and work far from one of the meeting spaces), with different topics at each meeting
• One main meeting and one or more SIGs (special interest groups) that delve more deeply into a specific facet of the profession or technology
• Workshops – an all-day (or half-day) event that delves deeply into a subject, perhaps with hands-on activities.
• Stump the panel – I’ve seen this done as a warm-up to a monthly meeting, where attendees bring up their sticky problems and the group leaders attempt to provided an answer or solution to the problem.  I’ve also seen this done as a stand-alone activity, where at least one thought-leader in the group (and perhaps others who wish to provide advice) are available to the rest of the membership  on a drop-in basis one or two nights a month to try to resolve their most insolvable problems.
• Follow-up – After a presentation in the ain meeting, a second meeting is held in which the membership discusses what was said in the main presentation.
• * Saturday – SharePoint does this, SQL does this, ProductCamp and TweetCamp do this (unconference-style); it is a free, all-day event with multiple tracks and multiple sessions, where presenters, often leaders in the field, show up to give presentations.
• Vendor of the month – like the first on the list, but with vendors talking about their specific product or service.

If you have seen anything different, I’d love to hear about it.  If one or more of these have been done particularly effectively in your community, I’d love for you to tell me about it.  Help me to know what I don’t know.  And if any of the ideas above strike your interest, let’s talk about that too!

Please comment below!

Jim Adcock is Vice President of Launch Pad Job Club, an organization in Austin, Texas, whose mission is help people who have lost their jobs to get the skills they need to land their next job, and to help them cope with the interim between jobs. Check out other career-related entries.

More posts about SharePoint.

So I’ll be presenting, but there is bad news too… I had two topics I wanted to present, but they had som many submissions that each speaker will only get one slot.  The final decision of which presentation I’ll do has not been made, and I’m giving you a chance to help decide which one it will be!

SharePoint Group Therapy (A SharePoint Governance Workshop)

This session is intended for Business stakeholders and SharePoint administrators. 

Do your users complain about the usability of your SharePoint?  Do you suffer from site proliferation?  Rights management issues?  Content inaccuracy and staleness?  Can you easily tell who owns the content of a particular site or list?  Do you have rogue SharePoint servers in your environment?  Is your SharePoint out of control?

Then you might benefit from SharePoint Group Therapy.

At the very least, this session will give you a free hour of group therapy, as you will have a chance to vent about your (SharePoint) problems in a roomful of sympathetic listeners.

I’ll play therapist and help move participants past their trauma and regain a sense of control through Governance.

This session is structured as a workshop, with participants interacting with each other in what should be a lively, opinionated discussion of what SharePoint Governance should be, and how it should work. 

Since the goal of therapy is to actually make things better, you should bring your questions about SharePoint Governance and aligning your business objectives with SharePoint, and I’ll try to help you get answers.

• What problems are you having in your current environment?
• What fears do you have about implementing governance?
• What fears do you have about implementing SharePoint?

Participants should be prepared to share personal experiences with SharePoint governance and its absence.  We’ll talk about roles and responsibilities, stakeholder involvement, and fitting your organizational culture. We’ll also talk about changing your organizational culture using both carrots and sticks – training, enforcement and business alignment.

Business alignment can be seen as the marriage of IT and business objectives.  Every marriage has its rocky moments, and sometimes a therapist is needed to resolve those issues.  Perhaps your marriage could benefit from a little SharePoint Group Therapy?

The Calculated HTML column

Learn to take advantage of a Content Editor Web Part script that converts calculated columns into easy-to-read visualizations of project status, company performance metrics, and other data stored in SharePoint Lists and libraries.

The intended audience for this is managers and business analysts with a basic level of knowledge of HTML and Excel functions, or for managers and BA’s without that knowledge who just want to see what is possible in SharePoint. 

I’ll be demonstrating how to create inline HTML in SharePoint lists for a variety of purposes, using a calculated column to generate the HTML based on values in the list item properties.  This HTML can be used to display graphical dashboard information in the SharePoint list itself.  I’ll show how we actually use this ability in our environment to track task and project status.

You’ll see dynamic gauges, progress bars, and status icons, as well as graphical images used as hyperlinks to relevant information.  I’ll present real-world use cases for each of these graphical displays, as well as some best practices for managing the use of the script. 

(This presentation is based on solutions created by a power user in the environment I work in, which he drew from blog posts found here).

So which will it be?

Submit your opinion, and I’ll pass the results on to the folks running SharePoint Saturday Austin!

More posts about SharePoint.

In the spirit of “eating my own dog food“, I have several speaking engagements coming up.

First English Lutheran Stephen Ministry

Last year I spoke at St. Martin’s Stephen Ministry, presenting “Tools, Techniques and Resources for Supporting and Guiding the Disemployed Back to Employment”.  The presentation went well, and  another Stephen Ministry group, this time at First English Lutheran Church, heard about it through the grapevine and asked me to speak to them too.  I’ll be presenting at their meeting on November 21.

Lesson:  When you do something well, people hear about it.  (Corollary: If you screw up, people will hear about it too.  Don’t screw up!)

Round Rock ISD Partners In Education Foundation Career Fair

My kids go to school in the Round Rock School District, which sends out e-mail updates each week.  A couple of weeks ago, I read this request for speakers for their upcoming Career Fair:

District needs speakers for Career Fair 
The Annual Round Rock ISD Partners In Education Foundation Career Fair will be held Friday, Nov. 18, 2011 at the Round Rock Higher Education Center, 1555 University Blvd, Round Rock from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. The Career Fair is a wonderful opportunity for ninth grade students across the district to learn more about potential careers, RRISD Academies, and postsecondary educational options in the Central Texas Area. The district is looking for speakers to address students about their chosen profession and answer any questions. 

An opportunity to talk about both SharePoint and career management, at the same time?  Couldn’t pass that up, and the Career Fair couldn’t pass me up either, so I’ll be spending my day on November 18 talking to high school freshmen from all over the school district.

Lesson:  there is always someone looking for volunteers!  Keep your eyes open for opportunity.

SharePoint Saturday Austin

This event isn’t until January, and I haven’t received confirmation, but I have submitted two presentation topics and will likely be speaking there on one or both of these topics:

SharePoint Group Therapy (A SharePoint Governance Workshop)

The calculated HTML column

See you there!  Don’t forget to bring the team!

Final thought – If you know something, speak up!

Network, network, network!

I’ll be at the Bridge ATX networking happy hour tomorrow evening (November 2), and the Central Texas SharePoint User Group next Wednesday (November 9).  I’m not presenting at either of these events, but these are pretty much the last events of the year, and I’d be happy to talk to you personally about your career, SharePoint, (or both!) so don’t miss them!

Jim Adcock is Vice President of Launch Pad Job Club, an organization in Austin, Texas, whose mission is help people who have lost their jobs to get the skills they need to land their next job, and to help them cope with the interim between jobs. Check out other career-related entries.

No, no boring vacation photos.

Do you remember how, the first week of school, we were often required to write an essay on what we did over summer vacation?  

Being unemployed isn’t a summer vacation, but the expectation of reporting what you did while you weren’t employed (in an informative and compelling way!) is very similar to the essay requirement.

With school starting up again, and with more people landing interviews, I’m hoping you’ll find the topic particularly timely.

I will be talking from approximately 10:30 to 11:30 a.m. during the regular LPJC meeting at the Phillips Pavilion, 1504 E 51st Street.

What have you been doing since your last job?

Jim Adcock is Vice President of Launch Pad Job Club, an organization in Austin, Texas, whose mission is help people who have lost their jobs to get the skills they need to land their next job, and to help them cope with the interim between jobs. Check out other career-related entries.

As a twitter user, your followers are different (by and large) from my followers.  This statement is true for any values of “you” and “me”.  There may be some overlap, more likely a greater level of overlap if we follow each other or both follow similar people, but you and I are highly unlikely to have exactly the same followers.

Let’s say, for the sake of discussion that there is an organization whose work I believe in.  I follow that organization’s twitter account.  They tweet something that I want to share with my followers.  I click the retweet button (or I copy and paste the tweet text into a new tweet) and share it with my followers.  For people who do not follow the organization, I get to expose them to the organization’s message.  For people who do follow the organization, they get a second chance to see the tweet that they might have overlooked (tweets being the ephemeral things they are).

If lots of people retweet what the organization tweeted, their message is magnified greatly to an audience far larger than just those who follow them (and were paying attention at the moment of the tweet).

This is what Donate Your Account is all about. 

Donate Your Account (DYA) is a service that allows LPJC (and other organizations) to leverage that difference in followers and allow organizations to spread their message beyond just their own followers (for free).

DYA allows organizations to select which of their messages are important enough to get wider distribution, and allows Twitter users to retweet an organization’s tweets without having to take any action.

Obviously, this requires a level of commitment to, and trust of, the organization in question by the user.  There are built-in limitations on the system to enforce that trust and prevent abuse.  Users have to explicitly give permission to the DYA service to have access to their accounts.  Users select the level of commitment to the organization by selecting how frequently they will allow the organization to use them to help spread their message – once a day, once a week, or once a month.  This frequency limit prevents abuse.  And, at any time, the user can revoke the authorization for the application to have access to their twitter account.

Very committed users can still choose to re-tweet other tweets by the organization, over and above what the organization is sending through DYA, but they have to do it manually.

As far as Launch Pad goes, we’ve only pushed few tweets through DYA in the three months we’ve used it.  We only have three twitter followers that are using the system, too.  Those three followers, however, have a total of 470 followers, which, in comparison to the 50 followers Launch Pad has at the time of this writing, is a pretty big multiplier effect.

I hope you would be willing to help Launch Pad get its message out by signing up for our Donate Your Account campaign.

If you are involved with other worthy causes, let their communications/social media/marketing people know about Donate Your Account, to help them spread the word about their organization and its activities.

Jim Adcock is Vice President of Launch Pad Job Club, an organization in Austin, Texas, whose mission is help people who have lost their jobs to get the skills they need to land their next job, and to help them cope with the interim between jobs. Check out other career-related entries.