My involvement with SARSEF is constantly rewarding but their latest project / initiative is particularly heartwarming in these days of COVID. Introducing the SARSEF School Fairs site, a FREE service to all Arizona schools allowing them to host their own virtual science fairs.

Did I mention it is being offered to them for FREE?

It was a very enjoyable and challenging job to get it done and launched on a tight schedule, big props to Nick, Danniey, Julie, and Liz for throwing their shoulders into it and making it happen.

Check it out and check out SARSEF , it is truly a huge Southern Arizona gem!

Job Candidates: Learn the fundamentals of career searching and get personal feedback on your work? Check.

Job Candidates: Connect with employers in the aerospace industry in your region and nationwide? Check.

Employers and Aviation Professionals: Connect with career-ready candidates preparing and looking for a career in aviation/aerospace? Check.

Employers and Aviation Professionals: Participate in nationwide online, and regional live, education and outreach to candidates that are enthusiastic about a career in aviation/aerospace? Check.

Workforce Development Professionals: Participate in a valuable and exciting new tool to develop your region’s aviation/aerospace workforce? Have an immediate impact through personal contact with candidates, employers, and nationwide and regional aviation professionals? Check and Check.

Check it out and get involved! https://pathwaystoaviation.org

The site is both the public side and a highly developed “registered users” portal to personally engineer each candidate’s progress through a Career Ready certification process. Employers and aviation professionals can connect with candidates to assist them and employers can find candidates that have proven themselves to be worth a careful look. Professional development events, both online and live, are easy to RSVP to, even for those that haven’t yet registered.

This is the first in a series of new posts which should be sub-titled “New Shoes for the Cobbler’s Kids.”

Anyway, the better part of the last year has had SARSEF and ScienceFairWare two of the biggest projects taking priority. SARSEF is the Southern AZ Science and Engineering Fair, a regional science fair for K-12 students in all of Southern AZ. It showcases top 1,800 or so projects that are the best examples of student research happening in Baja Arizona, a distillation that started with 40,000-50,000 projects.

SARSEF approached us with a dated website and an administrative database that was seriously in need of updating. The result of a year’s effort, on our part and theirs, is a unified website/database that meets their communication and publishing needs as well as complete management and administration of the fair. Teachers are able to register their students’ projects, volunteers are able to sign up to work various shift throughout the year and during the week of the fair, judges are able to register and provide information needed to place them on a judging team, sponsors are able to describe the awards they are donating, exhibitors can sign up to participate in opportunities throughout the year and during the week of the fair, and schools can schedule outreach presentations to be made for their faculty, students, and parents. This is all seamlessly coupled with full administrative control of all data including a stunning amount of output options including reports, emails, name badges, mailing lables, merged personal letters, and more.

SARSEF developed here at Jenson Consulting and Raven’s Eye Design is responsible for graphic design. We’ve partnered on other projects and look forward to more in the future.

Then take a close look at ScienceFairWare since the software has been so successful we are marketing it to the over 300 other fairs in the country, plus others abroad, that could potentially benefit greatly from this software solution.

Very easy to browse hundreds of reviews!

Warning!

If you like cars, planes, motorcycles, trains, or just about anything that goes fast, and you like to read, this website could quickly become a major occupier of your time.

Now that you have been warned, go check out http://speedreaders.info. Maintained as a free service supported primarily by donations and just a tiny bit of unobtrusive advertising (the public radio model), it provides extremely well-written reviews about books and media to do with transportation.

The contributors are from around the world and a variety of backgrounds but they all share a common passion for their subject matter and a very refined ability to dissect the books and media they review. With over 400 reviews and more being added each week the site is a treasure trove of useful information. Each review conveniently links to Amazon to satisfy the need to get the actual book or video.

The site is very simply designed and presented to make the content shine. It is the text, images, and occasional links that are the stars here so the site’s function and form were created to make that as easy to navigate as possible. The design is intended to stay as far out of the way of the content as possible. The slider in the sidebar shows 50 randomly chosen covers that each click-through to a particular review. The All Reviews page is a full table of links to all reviews currently on the site. Browsing by review author or category is as easy as a pull-down menu in the sidebar, and the search box in the header is the quickest way to find something specific you have in mind.

The fine folks at Speedreaders.Info are a joy to work with – this site was a redesign of an existing site that was accomplished in just under two weeks.

I love working with clients that have their own graphics team. NCASEF publishes Avanti Magazine so they've got serious talent to work with and it shows on their site.

Say this three times fast:

The National Coalition of Associations
of Seven-Eleven Franchisees

My first reaction was “you really need to do something about that name.” It was quickly made clear to me that not only has the National Coalition been around for 30 years under that name, but that the name very accurately represents the organization. It is, in fact, an “organization of organizations.” It is the entity that coordinates activities and allows a large number of Franchisee Owner Associations (FOAs) to speak with one voice. Franchisee members and vendor affiliate members enjoy a variety of benefits that association and synergy can provide.

It is also filled with a remarkable group of people that are a joy to work with.

Their new site, http://ncasef.com, is the public side of a very large piece of custom database software. That “back office database” drives the website and helps them manage all of their administrative tasks as well as registrations for their annual convention plus numerous Board and FOA meetings held across the country.