Recently, I took my family on a vacation out west. We visited San Francisco, Oakland, and Seattle. In all three of these cities, we continually found ways to enhance our courses, either through the filming of lectures, or the filming of meetings.
We started our trip in San Francisco with a conference of 160 Udemy instructors from around the world. Udemy Live gave us the opportunity to attend several workshops, as well as a couple of keynote talks. We heard from Udemy’s founder and also their CEO. They set a vision for the future and detailed their past of growing pain and the challenges they overcame. For all of our students, we filmed many new lectures that will soon be added to our courses. These ranged from implementation meetings with non-profit organizations that we are working with, as well as videos geared toward encouraging and inspiring students along their journey of learning and potential career change.
The videos involving the non-profit organizations cover how to utilize catchafire.org to easily connect with organizations around the country in need of volunteers. We are working on a Salesforce Implementation and Data Cleanup Project for the California School Age Consortium, based out of Oakland, California – calsac.org. We are also assisting with another Salesforce Implementation with iLeap out of Seattle, Washington.
My main drive in taking on these projects and documenting them is to help others to get certified and build their resumes. I think it is also helpful to lead by example, and the ability to meet with these organizations in person will add a lot of value to my video lectures in my courses. This will help people to envision how to volunteer for a non-profit organization, so that they too can build their resume, help others, and get hands on experience in applying what they are learning towards their certification goals.
Also, there are some commonalities between non-profit and for-profit implementation meetings. The key things are addressing the problems or pain-points that need to be solved. One key difference is that it is helpful to have experience working on non-profit projects and the Salesforce Non-Profit Starter Pack, especially. There are a few differences between for-profit organizations and non-profit organizations. First, the handling of Accounts and Contacts can vary greatly between the two. Next, Opportunities appear as Donations in the Non-Profit Starter Pack
My goal with most of the videos that we shot was to inspire others and to help them overcome the very common fears of failure, not being smart enough, being too old, too young, or too whatever. There is a lot of self-doubt, which I also experienced when I set out to first get certified.
I had a lot of doubt as well with creating my first certification course. Being on the other side of both, I see that those fears and doubts are misplaced, so my goal is to take others from “What if?” to “Why not?”. So, rather than listening to the negative voices of “what if something bad happens?” or “what if I can’t do this?” to instead flip it to a positive of “why not me?”, and simply go for it.
