I had a big evil plan put in place for Twestival. I had Stephen from SureFire Promotions plotting music with with the awesome people from Do512.com. I had Drupal developers EmpoweredBy who built a sweet fundraising leaderboard for me and a logo by Dieter Erik von Schramm. After some issues coordinating with non-profits and volunteers, I’m going to have to bow out of this Twestival.

Why would you do that, Michelle? You crushed our dreams.
1.) I had a blast coordinating the last one, but I do think it took it out of me and I wasn’t able to deliver to my clients. Supporting non-profits is a good thing, but so is delivering to your customers. So is making a ton of money so you can pay lots of taxes and generate jobs. If there is anything I want more in the world right now, it’s a client or a full-time gig that lets me do what I do best, which is leveraging the online space to take care of and empower customers so they remain forever loyal to a company. I am tired of good companies not making it and tired of seeing people being laid off. I have a good amount of experience in both hardware and software marketing, and believe this is the best place for my energies to go.

I also found that volunteers were a bit stressed as they had full-time gigs too.

2.) I was unable to hand this to a non-profit who could see it through. Apparently that is against the nature of Twestival. I do not understand this, as the biggest shareholder in a Twestival Local taking off is the non-profit itself. I would think they could make it the most successful.

3.) I found that the non-profits I pursued had their own events coordinated, so I did not want to detract from their efforts by contributing to “cause fatigue”. People only have a finite amount of time and energy. The more events we have, the less time we can spend working, supporting non-profits’ ongoing efforts, or just chilling out.

If you are bummed about this, I’ll gladly pass the torch and give you my blessing if I feel that you are doing it for the right reasons. I genuinely don’t care how big or small you make it, so long as you are doing it because you are compelled to make a difference.