What is your name?
Kali Idziak/SL
Jessica Dally/RL
I represent Community Voice Mail and I am staff member. My job is Help Desk Technician
http://www.cvm.org
Why did you decide to come into Second Life?
I had been in SL just on my own for about 9 months before we came in here. We learned that SL was having more and more opportunity for non profits and then the MacArthur foundation event passed thru my ED’s hands and, knowing I’d been in here, we began to check things out for our organization
How will your nonprofit use second life?
Well… our main focus for SL is using it as a social networking tool for our nonprofit. Our nonprofit is based on a federation model, so we partner with other organizations all over the us, and hopefully the world to provide voicemail.
We’re hoping to expand our contacts with other non profits thru our use of SL and also simply to get the word out about what we do to anyone who will listen. So many folks forget that it’s quite hard, if not impossible, to get a job, an apartment, whatever, without a phone number… easily overlooked and
yet so vital. That would be our primary objective here… but we’re also trying to stay open to other possibilities as we all learn what can be done in SL
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How will you realize your objective? What is your strategy? what are some nuts and bolts things you plan to do in here?
Our first real project was simply to set up the office!Now that we’re done with that there’s a bit of a lull in our involvement here as we have our RL convention this next week. From there we’re hoping to do many of the things the other non profits are doing… hold events to educate people, etc.. but mainly just being in here and talking to the other non profits has done quite a bit to get the word out to potential partners
Does your ED allow you to spend work time here?
She’s great about that but really it’s something that I can do while working hours.
What is your advice for other nonprofits about doing a project or having a presence in here?
My biggest piece of advice is to come in and just play for a bit (if you can). I can’t tell you how much my experience of “playing” has helped me with the non profit part… knowing how to interact in sl, how to do some very basic building and having some amazing friends that were able to help me immensely with set up and scripting all of these things I got from being in here a
bit, seeing how things work, before just trying to jump in… I guess, in the corporate world, it’d be called “knowing your market” and in this case knowing your reality too… what can and can’t be done… what works and what doesn’t.
Written by: kanter