The AFP Conference was our second attempt to engage a larger group and see how we can help. After going to the HANO Annual Conference with just Kari Leong and Ikaika Honda, we found that by not being inside the conference as a formal session, it was super draining on our energy to talk to everyone on a one on one basis. Although we got some good results from the HANO conference we knew that our energy was finite and limited. That’s when we decided to bring a group of 20+ people to the AFP Conference.
The AFP Conference had 300+ of the development and fundraising professionals for Hawaii’s largest non profit organizations. Since we only had a couple breaks between conference sessions to engage with attendees, the idea was to bring a larger group of people with pay it forward attitudes to help out and onboard attendees into the version 2 software. Although this produced ok results and we increased the database to 90+ people, it still felt like “cold calling” and wasn’t the intimate feeling that we wanted. This brought us to the current iteration and format.
We decided after the AFP conference that we would “beta test” a few formats on our own small group to see if it would work on a larger group of strangers. That brought us to the beta test #1 event where we met at the Omidyar Hawaii Leadership Forum office and the rest is history.
Here are some photos of Kokua.org participants at the AFP Conference.
