Thank you technology!

Technology saved us so much time after the Earthquake in Haiti.  As most of you know, we do a lot of stuff with Child Hope - here are some ways we used technology to keep us from going crazy.

eDivvy.com - Within about 24 hours after the Earthquake we had a social fundraising event set up.  People could easily tell their friends go to edivvy.com/childhope and donate.  Of course, this was blasted all over twitter and facebook as well.  200k was raised in under a month.

Google Apps
Since the earthquake we have had about 400 people sign up on the website to go to Haiti.  Imagine trying to sort through 400 emails looking for specific skill sets, which is what we would have had to do before with regular email.  What a nightmare.  Thankfully, we just created a google spreadsheet and clicked create form and in under an hour we had a form on our website.  The alternative was some php/mySQL combination that makes my head hurt.  I would probably have more options that way, but I needed something simple and fast and easily shareable.

We also switched some of the key people at Child Hope over to Google Apps mail, eliminating archaic email systems - although we still miss the "You've Got Mail" sound when we login... We don't miss full inboxes.  Processes in email are now automatic and streamlined.

Documents can be shared without having to send attachments and everybody can update documents.

Calendars of important events/teams can easily be shared by everyone.

When Alicia's hard drive crashed - I set her up with another one in under an hour.  Most of her important stuff was in her gmail or on Google Docs already - I didn't even install Microsoft Office, we are going online in this house!  Google Chrome and Skype.  That's all she really needs to work right now.

Skype - Invaluable.  Sometimes email wouldn't even work, but Skype would to communicate with people in Haiti.

We are still looking at other ways to streamline our processes at home and for our friends in Haiti, but these were the ones that came to mind.