Startup Weekend: We’re Doing Good and We Need Your Help

This weekend, there are Startup Weekends taking place everywhere. Teams are building new social networks, better tools for business, and all sorts of crazy sexy ideas.

Our team isn’t.

We’re building a non-profit tool to provide real-time information for people who need to know which homeless shelters have beds available each night. We’re working under the name “Homing In” (though, given this is Startup Weekend, that name could change later today).

It’s not cool, but it’s necessary. It’s also not easy: there’s no business model other than a non-profit. But a non-profit means that we have to ask for donations at some point.

One of the core elements of the Startup Weekend experience is validation. From our perspective, that means validating our ability to get donations as well as the usefulness of our website concept as well.

There’s been plenty of discussion on how the startup community needs to focus on the world outside our narrower point of views. So we’re asking: who’s ready to do something?

We’ve got a validation survey right here.

Afraid to click through? Here’s the three questions we’re asking:

* Do you have a budget for philanthropy / donations? If so, are you willing to share how much?
* Would you rather support non-profit projects with money or with resources (i.e. donating a few hours of an engineer’s time, hosting, or volunteer hours)?
* How often are you willing to support a non-profit organization with money or with resources?

We’re also asking for a little bit of identifying information so we can follow up with you.

Want to help us even more? We’re still working to get survey responses from volunteers and employees of homeless shelters. We’d appreciate it you could tweet out the following:

Friends who volunteer/work at homeless shelters: Need answers ASAP to 3 questions for an idea! http://bit.ly/1x5VQIb #pdxsw #GSB2014

We’ve also got a tweet you can share for people who may be willing to support our project in other ways.

Startup folks, help us validate non-profit support for a Startup Weekend project! Please RT! http://bit.ly/119xLn7 #pdxsw #GSB2014

Thank you for any time you care to give us. We appreciate it!