mapocathy

As you should. Here is the complete report from the Sandia National Laboratories (and more about Sandia National Laboratories).

Here is the complete report from the Sandia National Laboratories. And more about Sandia National Laboratories.

Great question! Short answer: it’s a balancing act. Most of our volunteers have paying jobs and family commitments that come first. So we try very hard to find projects/work assignments that coincide with a volunteer’s passion and which respects how much time a volunteer can commit to.

To avoid burnout, we welcome honest communication and boundary setting. We also ensure people are working on the highest value work. We value delivery over activities.

• Marie Kalliney, Innovation Co-Director

Great questions, u/BaniGrisson.

What projects to pursue: Members of the Helpful Community come to us with ideas to solve a certain problem.  Once a project has been received, Helpful reviews it internally for a number of different factors including project viability, the need it is addressing, and the potential impact of the project.  If the project meets the criteria, Helpful will make it a sponsored project, at which point we can provide it with resources such as prototype funding, volunteers, QA/RA assistance, and project management to help it come to fruition.

Funding: We receive funding from grants as well as individual donations.  We are constantly looking for more sources of funding to be able to continue to grow the number of projects we are supporting and problems to solve.  Please click here if you are interested in contributing.

Joining Helpful: We are always open to new volunteers - you can sign up here.

Media and Social Networks: We've been featured on a few media platforms (such as Scientific America, the Guardian, Fast Company, etc), but we would like to see more coverage. As we use all available funds to support the projects, our communications department works without a real budget. Therefore, we have focused on spreading the word about our mission and efforts through our own social media accounts and websites, and by building relationships with our stakeholders and using their communication channels.

We hope that with more projects coming to completion the media interest for Helpful will increase organically.

How do you contact people at a local level to let them know about your designs?

1. We use social media and word of mouth.
2. We are in the early stages of launching a project: Reach4Help, to enable communities to discover and solve local problems (and leverage boots-on-the-ground human intelligence).

• Seth Manoff, Chief Financial Officer at Helpful

Great question, TheMooseIsBlue. A large part of it is because we're mostly voluntary engineers, product designers, and developers, and we don't have enough marketing resources to produce the marketing materials to the level of snazziness that we agree would help with our causes. I wish we have more help.