David Neff is the founder and past CEO of Lights. Camera. Help (LCH). LCH is the world’s first nonprofit focused on cause driven and nonprofit filmmaking. He now serves as the VP of its board. He is also a past president of the Social Media Club of Austin. Neff did not attend SXSW while he was a student at The University of Texas, but has spoken at SXSW for the last seven years. SXSW first reached out to him when it was primarily a music conference and before the other tracks of the conference were added.

Neff started his career at the American Cancer Society and spent nine years with them. He has always been interested in volunteering and that has influenced his career choices. Even though he is no longer works with non-profits, he has always served on boards.

“I’ve always just had a really big interest in volunteering, how you work with volunteers, how you get the community involved in helping out other folks in their community,” he said.

His panel this year will be about how you find and retain and get volunteers motivate to help your cause.

The inspiration behind the panel came from Kate Baucherel from the United Kingdom, a fellow panelist, who has done some interesting demographic work collecting both qualitative and quantitative survey data on how people retain and manage and use volunteer talent.

“She organized the panel and she found me with what we are doing at (LCH) and she found my friend Victoria Taylor who is the Head of Command at WeWork which is a co-working space. Victoria also works at a lot of volunteer organizations at WeWork, so we have the for-profit and the non-profit side of using volunteers for our panel,”he said.

Neff hopes the biggest takeaway from his panel will be “a lot of what doesn’t work”. He said the panel will have lots of interesting stories about things that have failed, things that have been tested, what not to do and what works and what doesn’t. This panel will be full of interesting data and statistics.

David Neff also has written a book Ignite:Setting your Organization’s Culture on Fire with Innovation.

You can reach David Neff on Twitter and LinkedIn. You can also visit LightsCameraHelp on Youtube to view some of the films they have worked on.

Friday, March 10
12:30 p.m. – 1:30 p.m.
Hilton Austin Downtown – Salon K / 500 E. 4th St.

Find out more: Retaining Volunteer Talent in Your Community