The ZURBlog is where we discuss interaction design and strategy.

The ZURBwired plans are in full swing now, and we're happy to announce that open submissions for nonprofits are running now through March 18th! All nonprofits interested in participating in ZURBwired have from today until March 18th at midnight to submit their interest to the team at wired@zurb.com.

What is ZURBwired?

Siming Wong and Brice McGowen work on the menu template.

ZURBwired is a 24-hour design collaboration, hosted annually by ZURB, where we complete a marketing effort for one lucky nonprofit. It's 24 straight hours of doing what we do best, all to benefit one special nonprofit organization, and all at almost no cost to them. That's right; maybe it's a new website, maybe it's posters and invites for an upcoming event, whatever the materials involved, the nonprofit will walk away at the end of the day with all the completed and printed collateral—literally hot off the presses—and it will cost only their time and commitment to the event.

ZURBwired is an opportunity for ZURB to use it's skills to give back to our local community. The idea is to collaborate with a nonprofit organization using our design expertise to produce something great. This year will be our third ZURBwired and every year we're more overwhelmed by the results, as well as the number of people volunteering to help us make the event a success.

What can you really get done in 24 hours?

A lot more than you would think thanks to ZURB's talented team and our dedicated partners and volunteers. You can get that sweet new logo along with a website relaunch. You'll finally get that newsletter campaign going and setup those AdWords landing pages you've been meaning to do. And print collateral? We can design and produce all the cool schwag and marketing brochures you need, all in 24 hours. They'll be in your hands that very day. For real.

It's at no expense to your non-profit if you're willing to join in with us and work just as hard as we do for it. And did we mention it's for 24 hours straight? It's crazy, but as our last ZURBwired showed, it's exhilarating and creates results fast.

What do I need to do?

If you're a nonprofit, you need to gather your core team—those folks who will be here with us all day (and night!)—and send us an email at wired@zurb.com that includes:

1. The project you need ZURB's help with
2. The team who's going to be here for 24 hours helping us make it happen
3. Why your organization is a fit for ZURBwired.

If you're a vounteer or a potential partner for ZURBwired, you just need to email us (wired@zurb.com) and tell us what skills or services you'll bring to the event and why you think you're a fit for ZURBwired.

Find out more about ZURBwired »

We'll be announcing our ZURBwired 2010 nonprofit partner on Friday, March 19th.

It's that time of the year again. ZURB has started planning our annual ZURBwired design marathon for April 8, 2010.

What is ZURBwired?

It's 24 straight hours of doing what we do best, all to benefit one special Bay Area nonprofit organization, and all at no cost to them. That's right; maybe it's a new website, maybe it's posters and invites for an upcoming event. Whatever the materials involved, the nonprofit will walk away at the end of the day with all the completed and printed collateral—literally hot off the presses—and it costs their team nothing but their time.

We'll team up with area volunteers and vendors who will all spend the day (and night!) at ZURB Headquarters powering through web and print collateral for the nonprofit whose proposal is chosen for this year's event.

What Do I Need to Do Now?

The event's not until April 8, but open submissions for nonprofits will be March 4-18.

In the meantime, we're looking for volunteers & partners to participate on the big day. We need people who want to work with the ZURB team and our chosen nonprofit from 8:00am April 8th until 8:00am April 9th. To be considered, just shoot an email to wired@zurb.com to tell us what skills you'll bring to the day, and why you want to participate.

Vendors interested in partnering with us should also send an email to wired@zurb.com to let us know how they can help provide the goods and services donated to the nonprofit.

Last year's partners included Zazzle, Tradewinds HD, and Chase VP, not to mention our long list of volunteers who stuck it out with us during ZURBwired 2009:

Let's Make Sure You've Got This

• The 24-hour design marathon is April 8th, 2010.
• Volunteers & potential partners should start sending us emails today.
• Interested nonprofits should be ready to send us their proposals during
  open submissions: March 4-18.

For more information on this incredible event, or to see what we did for ZURBwired 2009, check out zurbwired.com.

The team is psyched to get the ball rolling on this year's event. Will we see you there?

In a recent conversation with a client, we made the suggestion that the company should remove the chairs in the conference room. The suggestion got a little bit of a chuckle, but the reality is that chairs in a group discussion rarely help the team get stuff done. Removing chairs isn't a solution to the meeting problem, but it's a fantastic tactic to improve the quality of most meetings.

Seth Godin has a nice blog post on fixing the meeting problem. Seth takes a broader view of the problem, but ZURB would agree on most of his points. Removing chairs happens to be number four on his list.

So why do standing meetings work?

1. The first obvious reason is that people don't like to stand for long periods of time, so it creates a sense of "moving on to the next thing."
2. Standing gets more blood flowing and this activity encourages participation.
3. Long meetings standing up are tiring, so people will tend to keep them short and productive.
4. Standing encourages people to do something other than talk. Whiteboards become a new opportunity to drive the meeting.

Just to prove the chair point, here is a great example of standing "meetings" from ZURBwired last week. If you watch this time lapse video over the second part of the 24 hours (10PM-8AM), you'll notice there were many standing scrums. There's a great one around 1:30am where a flurry of activity around whiteboards is followed up by individual efforts and smaller scrums (keep in mind this was only one big room- there were other breakout rooms where more projects were being worked on).

If your company has a problem with meetings, start removing chairs. Get your team invested in getting projects done. Tell everyone to please stand up.

I've got a coffee in one hand, but the eyelids are still a bit heavy. On behalf of ZURB, I'd like to congratulate everyone that worked so hard to get this project completed. It's been an amazing 24 hours working with the Pie Ranch team. We're extremely proud of the effort everyone put in to make this event a success. This is our second ZURBwired event, so I'll just go ahead and call us the craziest design team in the world. It's great to know that our efforts have helped Pie Ranch get closer to their goal of raising 5 million dollars. Thanks again for everyone’s hard work!

We hope parts of this experience will rub off on other non-profits that are looking to drive their organizations forward. Progress doesn’t always have to happen in 24 hours- but with a little inspiration and a motivated team, quite a lot is possible. Heck, corporations might learn something!

Over the course of 24 hours we created (we'll link to these over the coming days):

• Functional website with blog
• Newsletter template
• Content for donor packets and website
• Donations self-mailer with envelope
• Invites and envelopes
• Thank you cards and envelopes
• Round stickers
• Donor packet label
• A Poster
• Zazzle store
• Letterhead templates
• Envelope templates
• Pocket map template
• Farm dinner menu template
• Facebook page
• LinkedIn profile
• Twitter page

On the marketing side we published:

• 9 edited videos
• 300 images on Flickr
• 50 tweets (90 total zurbwired mentions)
• 19 blog posts

Special thanks goes out to Jeremy and Amanda of ZURB who put in the extra effort to pull this event off. Great job guys.

It came down to the last hour, but we have a fully functioning website launched at PieRanch.org. It's a fully redesigned site that includes new pages for their upcoming events and campaigns, better donation page flow, integrated social sites (YouTube, Flickr, and Twitter), and a clearer mission.

Here's a few pages from the website: