My First 90 Days at GlobalGiving
By 2012 Fellow Nick Hamlin
My transition into the non-profit world represented a major workplace shift. I came from a technical role in a global organization with thousands of employees. Our day-to-day work, while engaging, was dictated primarily by the deals signed by our sales team. Now, I work in an organization that fits entirely in a single big room, with only slightly more full-time employees than I have total digits. Instead of focusing on the same type of work each day, I find myself taking on a wide variety of tasks, simply because they have to get done. On any given day, I might be a data analyst, a programmer, a customer service agent, an accountant, an IT guy, or even a plumber.
While juggling these constantly shifting responsibilities can be a daunting task, it also gives me some flexibility to zero in on the areas where I can leverage my specific skills and interests to best help the organization. Like many engineers, I relish situations where I can take a a problem and run with it – sometimes without knowing exactly where it’s going to end up – because I usually get to learn something new and exciting along the way.
At GlobalGiving, I recently found myself picking up a new programming language to write new tools to help protect our donors, our partners, and ourselves from fraud. It started out simply, but by constantly iterating with the problems and the system, our tools have slowly grown more and more powerful to the point where we can now catch almost all fraudulent activity before it starts. When I’ve gotten stuck (which has happened many times), I look to two of our core values: “Listen, Act, Learn, Repeat” and “Never Settle” to help get back on track. I consider myself extremely fortunate to have a role in which personal experimentation is not just allowed, but institutionally encouraged.
Moving forward into the rest of my fellowship, it’s going to be challenging to find ways to balance the excitement and push I feel to work on these experimental projects with the day-to-day work that has to get done to keep the organziation afloat. There are so many awesome people doing exciting work at GlobalGiving that it can be hard to stay focused on just one or two things. Thankfully, though, I don’t always have to.