Crafting Brands and Pitching at the Nonprofit Tech Summit

Bill Schley, author of the Unstoppables, talking about branding to the Nonprofit Technology Summit at Rackspace.

Teaching nonprofit organizations to pitch, craft brands, harness social media, create effective presentations and use video to influence emotion and create action.
Those are a few of the strategies people learned Friday at the fourth annual Nonprofit Technology Summit at Rackspace.
The daylong event is focused on providing technology tools to nonprofit organizations, said Susan Thompson, vice president at the San Antonio Area Foundation.
This year, 275 people attended the event, up from 95 people last year.
“We do this to help build the capacity of nonprofits in our community so they can more effectively use these technology resources,” Thompson said. “This is really about helping them tell their story to donors, the people they serve and the whole community.”
The San Antonio Area Foundation, Rackspace, 3 Day Startup and the 80/20 Foundation sponsored the event, which took place at Rackspace’s new events center at its corporate headquarters in San Antonio.
“I think in the tech world the ability to have a good pitch is the difference between life and death,” said Lorenzo Gomez, executive director of the 80/20 Foundation. “The startup world gets so many resources to teach them to pitch and we wanted to bring those same resources to the nonprofit world.”
This year, five nonprofit organizations were selected to pitch their ventures at the conference. They went through a two-day version of the 3 Day Startup training at Geekdom. They are scheduled to pitch this afternoon.