What was your experience working on a Taproot Foundation project?

I love Taproot Foundation projects! The clients are passionate, fun, and very appreciative of our help. The volunteers I’ve worked with are real professionals with their own areas of expertise - it's great to see it all come together.

How have you grown from your pro bono experience?

Customer information is one of the business world's least understood assets. There are a lot of different stakeholders and agendas that get in the way of realizing the value. On my Donor Database projects, we use many of the same concepts as customer relationship management - finding the most likely donors, increasing donations, growing donor relationships - but you get to see the results much more quickly than you would in a large company. The payoff is in improving the world, not just making money.

What were the biggest challenges in your project?

One of the biggest challenges - and biggest advantages - of the two Taproot Foundation projects I've been a part of is the small size of the nonprofit clients. It's hard to remember that the nonprofit contact for the Taproot Foundation project may have a half dozen other jobs. But it also means they can make decisions quickly — there are no department boundaries to get in the way like there often are in large companies.

How do you think the business community and nonprofit sector can strengthen one another?

I think the business community can help nonprofit organizations successfully apply technology, something that nonprofit executives tell me they don't always have the time to think about. Nonprofits can help remind business about the impact individuals can have on the rest of the world and how we live in it.

What community issues are most important to you and what did you learn from the project?

I'm very interested in helping people help themselves. I learned a lot about the challenges of battered women in the project for WOMAN, Inc., a San Francisco nonprofit that handles over 12,000 hotline calls a year with less than 4 full-time employees. With the Seaflow project, I'm learning about ocean noise and its effect on the environment. It's interesting how many different ways there are to help.

Other than volunteering with the Taproot Foundation, what do you like to do in your free time?

I volunteer as a mentor to college and graduate students at www.mentornet.net - it's great to see smart women asking questions and learning how to thrive in the business world. On a personal level, we're lucky in Marin to have some of the best hiking around, as well as wine country only an hour away. My husband and I are making new wine discoveries all the time - cooking and eating and drinking.