Throughout SXSW Interactive (today-Tuesday), we’re sponsoring lunch at The Beacon Lounge and instead of asking SXSW attendees to pay for the food, we’re asking them to reach into their pockets and fork over their lunch money to support an Austin charity. Each day will be dedicated to a different organization and because we think sometimes more really is more, we’re going to match up to $500 per day.

I know you are reading this on your computer/smartphone/tablet and thinking “hey, that’s pretty sweet” and some of you are thinking “Sign me up! Food for a cause!”. For y’all, yup, see you for lunch! But for those of you thinking “Lame, I’m going to be at cousin Lucy’s wedding in No-wheres-ville instead” have no fear. In addition to accepting cash donations at the lunch we’ve also set up a donation page for anyone, SXSW attendee or otherwise, to contribute to the cause.

And now, ladies and gentlemen, I invite you sit back, relax and enjoy these short videos about our awesome beneficiary charities.

Saturday, March 10: Lifelong Friends

Sunday, March 11: American YouthWorks

Monday, March 12: Capital Area Food Bank

Tuesday, March 13: American Red Cross of Central Texas

Learn about all of Convio’s SXSW involvement.

This was originally posted on Connection Cafe.

Guest post by: Cheryl Black is the social media marketing specialist for Convio, a leading provider of constituent engagement solutions for nonprofits. She is a frequent speaker on fundraising, social media and marketing for nonprofits and is an active volunteer in her adopted hometown of Austin. You can read more blog posts by Cheryl and the whole Convio team on Connection Café.

I’ll be on the panel with a handful of other intelligent, enthusiastic Community builders and post-panel we’ll all be headed down the hallway to the Beacon Lounge to continue the conversation and enjoy music, food, and beverages.

The panel will uncover the organizational strategies of community building, maintaining engagement over time, and uniting a group of people who may have never met face-to-face. From helping people quit tobacco to establishing support groups for rare diseases and supporting healthy lifestyles, each organization approaches community engagement in a unique way. Come hear the successes and set backs of community building that strive to bring social issues to the forefront and address them in modern ways.

When: Friday, March 9th – 5 PM
Where: Austin Convention Center, Room 6 A/B
Who:
David Dobbins – Moderator (Legacy)
Mark Himmelsbach – Panelist (BBDO)
Scott Orn – Panelist (Ben’s Friends)
Kesah Schmitt – Panelist (Beaconfire)
Colin Wallis – Panelist (Livestrong)

#BuildEasy

Happy hour will directly follow the panel at 6 PM in the Beacon Lounge.  See you there!

Poetry Slam – How to Enter

Starting on Friday, March 9th, come to the Beacon Lounge to pick up a beautiful piece of a poetry paper. You can write your poem while hanging out in the Lounge or work on it all night and bring it back to place in the official NTEN Poetry Slam binder later. Not sure where to find the binder or get some paper to participate? Just ask Eve from Beaconfire – she’s your gal!

• You can write any kind of poem or written work (we do allow multiple submissions)
• It must fit on one piece of paper (to be picked up from the Lounge)
• It must be included in the Poetry Slam binder by Monday, March 12, at 10:30 am

Poetry Slam – How to Vote

This is a proper poetry slam, friends. Sarah and Amy will be facilitating an hour of nonprofit technology poetry reading and you can read your submission to the full audience in the Beacon Lounge! There will be winners and there will be lots of great prizes.

• Poetry Slam is in the Beacon Lounge on Monday, March 12, 11 am – 12 pm
• You must read your own work or have a nominated reader if you cannot be present
• Anyone in the Lounge can vote!

Remember: You can enter more than one poem! After all, who are we to limit your free expression of all the things you love (or hate) about technology? Pick up your paper from the Lounge and be sure to have it back in by Monday morning. We can’t wait!

Join us this weekend at UX Smackdown! Usability Testing Techniques in the Ring.

I’ll be moderating this panel, which will feature three head-to-head bouts:

• Round 1: Field Research vs. Focus Groups
• Round 2: Eyetracking vs. Remote Unmoderated Tests
• Round 3: High Fidelity Prototypes vs. Rapid Iterative Testing

When it comes to usability testing, what works and what doesn’t? You’ll hear these topics explored by panelists with a wide range of expertise:

• Aviva Rosenstein, Sr Mgr. User Research at Salesforce
• Kyle Soucy, Founding Principal, Usable Interface
• Michael Summers, Consultant, Global User Experience at Paypal
• John Whalen, UX Lead & Founder, Brilliant Experience

When: Sunday, March 11th, 11 – 12
Where: Austin Convention Center, Ballroom BC

Hope to see you there!

Let’s remedy that RIGHT now. Not only is Beaconfire’s team 8 people strong this year (some familiar faces, some not), we are also speaking on 5 different sessions so you really can’t avoid us. Seriously. Don’t even try.

So without further ado, the (un) usual suspects are:

Michael Cervino, Lounge Host Extraordinare
@mpcervino

Jeff Herron, VP and Co Founder
@jdherron

Jordan Hirsch, Improvisational Tech Lead
@tfish77
Change Happens: Improv for an Unpredictable World
3/9 @ 2pm – Courtyard Marriot
Brazos

Scott Lenger, Standards Zealot
@ScottLenger
Sh!t Code: When Good Code is Betrayed
3/11 @ 5pm – Radisson Town Lake
Town Lake Ballroom

Mark Leta, Big man on Campus
@markleta

Kesah Schmitt, Master Juggler & Lounge Co-host
@Kesah
Building Community is Easy, Saving the World is Hard
3/9 @ 5pm – Austin Convention Center
Room 6AB

Rebecca Sherrill, UX Ringmaster
@BeccaS
UX Smackdown! Usability Testing in the Ring
3/11 @ 11am – Austin Convention Center
Ballroom BC

Eve Simon, Creative Avenger & Lounge Co-host
@Naieve
How Meaningful Design Can Save the World
3/10 @ 3:30pm – Austin Convention Center
Room 8A

Make sure you follow us on twitter, harass us at our sessions or just say hi when you see us in The Beacon. We won’t bite. Well, usually.

This year we are diving in with our feet first by co-sponsoring the TechMix Happy Hour on March 9th. We invite you to come out and mingle with the hosting teams, customers and SXSW attendees on a variety of topics. Because, honestly, when else are you going to be in a room with people who want to discuss leveraging the power of Twitter for nonprofits or debate whether or not Google+ is an influential tool, and over drinks to boot? If our happy hour wasn’t enough time to get the creative juices flowing, or other juices were flowing too much, our Social Media Marketing Specialist, Cheryl Black, will be hosting a nonprofit meet up in the Beacon Lounge March 10th from 1:30pm-2:30pm. We encourage people to take advantage of this fantastic networking opportunity, and of course the complimentary snacks.

On top of that we are sponsoring lunch every day (delicious eats for free, yes!) in the Beacon Lounge, where the theme is, “Lounge With A Conscience.” Falling in line with the theme, each day we will be accepting donations during lunch to go to a local nonprofit, and at the end of the day we will match up to $500 dollars. The nonprofits benefiting are:

• Saturday: Life Long Friends
• Sunday: Austin’s Chapter of American Youth Works
• Monday: Capital Area Food Bank
• Tuesday: Austin’s Chapter of American Red Cross

Nothing gets us more jazzed than to help out great organizations that are located right in our own backyard; because at the end of the day it is about the impact they are making in our community.

The icing on the cake that is our participation in this great festival is definitely our ability and fortune to be a supporting sponsor for the SXSW 2012 Interactive Awards. It’s kind of a big deal to receive it considering last year’s winners included, The Tiziano Project | 360⠁Kurdistan, The Onion, and Conan O’Brien Presents: Team CoCo, just to name a few.

I realize, this is a lot to take in, as is anything involving SXSW. Have no fear if you are new though, they provide a nice beginner’s guide and mobile app for those who are feeling overwhelmed.

In case this hasn’t revved up your engines for South by Southwest as much as it has for us, here is a sneak peek interview with our own Lori Bainborough, aka Convio’s own event guru, on why she can’t wait for this year’s festival.

Convio’s Lori Bainborough on SXSW 2012

This was originally posted on Connection Cafe.

Guest post by: Sarah Daniels, aka Marketing Intern. When Sarah isn’t trying out new cooking recipes, reading a good book, or in class she likes to take long walks with her weenie dog.

We hope you’ll join us at the Beacon where we can all do what we do best – Play Hard and Do Good.

Daily Events in the Lounge include:

• Breakfast from 9-11: Get your morning buzz on with coffee and food sponsored by The Colorado Health Foundation
• Lunch from 12-2: Refuel your stomach and mind with lunch brought to you by Convio.  Fork over your lunch money to a local Austin organization and Convio will match your donation!
• Happy Hour from 3-6: Get your afternoon buzz on with snacks, beer, and live music to benefit Sweet Relief Musicians Fund sponsored by Salsa.

Daily Musings in the Lounge include:

• Photo Gallery from PhotoPhilanthropy – browse art that drives action for social change.
• Sketchnotes by Mike Rhode
• Play Hard, Do Good T-Shirts from Goodthreads with art by Mike Rhode – snag yours with a donation to Sweet Relief Musicians Fund

In addition, we’ll have special events on a daily basis including a book reading from “Story Wars” by Jonah Sachs and meet-ups from the good folks at Salsa, NTEN, the Colorado Health Foundation, PhotoPhilanthropy, Convio, and Legacy.

Check out our detailed schedule of events and follow us @thebeaconsxsw for updates.

We’ll see you in Austin!

To provide a break from the chaos, The Beacon Lounge is returning for our 4th year as an oasis in the middle of the madness for the non profit community at sxsw and other cause-focused geekeratti. While the comfy seating, awesome vibe, great company and steady flow of food & drink (Thanks to our amazing partners) keeps everyone sane, we never want to forget what has brought us all together in the first place: The desire to create lasting social good in the world. While having massive (sleepless) amounts of fun, that is.

The Beacon exists for our dynamic community at sxsw, but also because of it. And so, our theme for 2012 was born: Play hard. Do good. From supporting local organizations through Lunch For a Cause everyday to giving away amazingly cool T-shirts by Mike Rohde with a donation to Sweet Relief Musicians Fund, giving back has always been the cornerstone of The Beacon. While you’re having a blast in Austin, we hope you can also help us make a real difference for real people.

Follow @thebeaconsxsw and #sxdogood to get the inside scoop on all the happenings.

• Kickin’ WiFi & great company
• Comfy couches & beanbag chairs
• Breakfast & coffee every morning
• Playing with your food during lunch provided by Convio
• Daily happy hour with live music on the Salsa Labs stage to benefit Sweet Relief Musicians Fund
• Mike Rodhe Sketchnote gallery

AND (as if the other stuff wasn’t enough)
• An overall energetic do-gooding vibe

Follow us @thebeaconsxsw for updates and more info as we get closer to Spring Break For Geeks (you KNOW you love it, don’t pretend).

Game on, baby. See ya in March!

7.  Eye contact anxiety. In a room/bus/street full of SxSWi folk, the majority of people have their head down tap-tap-tapping away on some mobile device, if not multiple devices. Back in the real world, not everyone is so obsessively connected.  Which had me a little paranoid on my commute to work this morning.  What exactly is everyone looking at?  What are they thinking about?  Are they really just sitting there?  Huh.  And, am I the only one on this bus wearing jeans and Chuck Taylors right now?

6. Hash tag fever. While prepping for a client conference call today, I actually took time to consider what the hash tag for the meeting should be.  #notsomuch.

5. Phantom geek speak. At SxSW I was constantly thinking, speaking, and overhearing in geek, which has led me to see and hear phantom geek speak everywhere I go. Flipping through a magazine on my flight back, I ran into an ad for SEO lip gloss.  I sat and stared at it for a little too long.  Could this really hold the key to getting to the top?  Nope, absolutely nothing to do with Search Engine Optimization.  I overheard a conversation on my lunch break about CSS and was wondering if they were as disappointed in the WC3 panel as I was.  But no siree, turns out were actually talking about the band with the same name.  I’m afraid this might be a long lasting symptom.

4. Device delusions. Did I remember to bring my iPad to work yesterday?  Yes.  Did I need it?  Not really.  Did I remember to bring my laptop to work yesterday?  No.  Did I need it?  YES!  Doh.  No concept of reality on this one as I almost even grabbed my SxSW badge on my way out the door.

3. WiFi High. I don’t know about you, but I’m still adjusting to the fact that there is not free WiFi and charging stations everywhere I go.  Leading to dead batteries and loss of connection.

2. Lone Star Dry Mouth. I didn’t have tacos, chips & salsa, BBQ, or beer all day yesterday.  Alright, so maybe I had a beer.   But only with dinner and not with lunch.  And definitely not between meetings.  And it wasn’t a Lone Star, nor was it free, nor was it surrounded by live music.  So needless to say, it left something to be desired.

1. Cat meme hallucinations. Between cats with mustaches, cat meme stickers, and conversations about famous internet cats carved out of giant blocks of cheddar, these pesky felines managed to have worked their way into my dreams.  I wish this was a joke, but it’s not.   I had a dream about cat memes last night.  Seriously disturbing.

meow

So in an experiment back home in being unplugged, I sat at a coffee shop sketching notes for this blog post on a napkin and the two guys sitting next to me were engaged in a in-depth conversation about donor database management.  That I can relate to.  Plus I work in an office full of geeks, live in a neighborhood full of hipsters, and it’s 70 degrees today here in the DC area. So maybe my reality isn’t that far off from my time in Austin.  In a good way.  One more day of SxSW and I might have turned into a robot.