Non-Profit Tech Blog

This fellow to the left claims to be ALL of the following:

1. Can bench press 400+ lbs
2. Can serve a tennis ball at 140 MPH
3. Can break a stack of bricks with his bare hands
4. Is a championship skier
5. Expert ballroom dancer
6. CEO of his own investment firm
7. And lastly, ED of his OWN non-profit!

Apparently, this was in the context of an i-banking resume. Suffice it to say, the spoof or fraud (what have you) has been already found out. What is especially salient is that the spoof Web site he created was much more professional looking than the target of his spoof. You know life is bad for our sector when a championship skier can make a better looking site than a legitimate org. Ok, he’s not a championship skier but you get the idea. Sigh. He even cheekily inserted the Four Star logo from Charity Navigator.

Ivygateblog says:

Vayner’s site has a “Charity Navigator Four Star Charity” logo from Charity Navigator, an organization that ranks good charities and weeds out frauds. We called them this morning. “Oh, we’ve heard of them,” Leonie Giles, a program analyst there, said immediately. They asked Aleksey’s site (which lists a non-existant Manhattan address on its “Donate Another Way” page, btw) to take down the fake “Four Star” logo two months ago, and are considering legal action against them. Giles recommended we contact the freaking Connecticut attorney general.

His site,even includes a (non-working) donate page and some hillarious paeans to the kind of brochureware that non-profits are fond of creating. Check out this “gem”:

One [sic] mental blocks to success are eliminated an individual needs the tools to achieve success; these core tools comprised of essential habits of developing a vision, goal-setting, time-management, positive affirmations, money management, and communication and social interaction are taught to help children reach their goals.

From the stilted syntax to the torturous list of platitudes on how to help children with his goals, he’s got our not-so-snappy development patter down pat. He even has the classic under construction Web page, “Pease [sic] come back later as this section is being updated.”, that so many non-profits have made a habit of in building their sites. This would be just another funny episode about someone’s overinflated ego bursting under the arrows of bloggers but it does highlight how easy it is to build a web site that could really hurt our sector. And it certainly puts the lie to the notion that non-profit workers don’t have enough time to keep their sites clean and updated. After all, this college student managed to do a non-profit AND his “investment firm’s” site as well as the editing for his outrageous video. We, as a sector, have got a lot of work to do.