NSS fund-raising pitch at JumpStart Foundry pitch day - live feed

[John Wark]

Hey gang,

A while back I invited you all to sign up to attend Jumpstart Foundry's Pitch Day.  Not sure how many of you are going to make it to the event but NSS will also be presenting at the event.  We've been given an opportunity to make a fund-raising pitch to the entrepreneurship and investor community. 

For those of you who can't attend but might have a chance to watch a live-stream of the event, here's a place you can go to register to get access to the live broadcast...

For those of you who can't make it in person for investor day (we have sold out 600 seats), please be aware of the online live stream, which you can access for registration here: jsf2013.com

Just as background - a bunch of your classmates have been scrambling for the past 10 days or so to allow us to take advantage of this opportunity.  Several projects have come together (or have almost come together - we're still working on some of it) to support our fund-raising campaign that launches tomorrow.

First - Amanda has been the overall cat herder and project manager for the various moving parts of several projects.  Her biggest challenge, as you can probably guess, was trying to channel me into a productive direction and not have me poking my nose into the wrong things at the wrong time.  She has also written copy, coded markup, shot video, edited photos, run to pick stuff up at the printer, and otherwise been indispensable.

Dustin has been lead dog on adding a major new capability to our NSS website - tomorrow afternoon visit the site and check out the Support page and the Campaign page that's under the Support page.  We'll have the ability to take donations to the school right on our website.  Dustin had some major bug-shooting issues with a Wordpress plug-in and some tweaks that Paypal made to their API but he figured it out.  He would come out a take a bow right now but he's busily making all the last minute changes to the Support and Campaign pages that I should have thought of a week ago but just gave him two hours ago. 

Laura and Brogan have also been helping with a whole host of website changes.  They've also been helping on additional website upgrades that we had to delay so that we could focus on the fund-raising campaign but we'll be rolling out more changes to the Community, Program and other pages in the near future. 

If you visit the Campaign and Support pages tomorrow one thing you'll see is a very spiffy video on each of those pages.  That's another NSS Productions last minute delivery.  Joe and Jay teamed up to provide most of the heavy lifting on this project, ably assisted by and herded by Amanda.  They took some old video we shot of the first cohort students plus a bunch of new video that Jay and Amanda shot over the last week or 10 days and used that as the source material for the new video.  Joe helped produce and write this masterpiece - he scripted out the video, helped find some B-roll material and the music, and provided the voice over magic that goes with all the movin' pictures.  Jay then pulled a couple of long days and late nights - sandwiched around a road trip to Cleveland and Canada to play some music - editing video and making it all work.  Check it out once we get the new pages live on the site. 

The final major moving piece of this effort was a marketing piece to support the fund-raising campaign.  Zach Keller jumped in on very short notice to design and produce a good-looking print piece that we'll be handing out tomorrow at Pitch Day. 

I have probably forgotten to acknowledge somebody in all of the above and if I have I am sorry.  All of you have my very deepest appreciation for donating all of the time, the energy and the creativity to help get this fund-raising effort underway.  Thank you for all of your work. 

[Brandon Lyons]

I can't wait to see the updates to the site I know they'll be great. I won't there at pitch day but I will be watching the livestream. Good Luck!