OPO Startups in St. Charles County is full of creative and innovative people who love to collaborate.

Regular events like “Try It Tuesdays” and “Startup Wednesdays” provide opportunities for like-minded entrepreneurs to come together and inspire one another in their respective ventures. But their desire to collaborate isn’t confined just to the startup community—this season these idea makers wanted to give back to the local St. Charles community whose support has been crucial in their success with The OPO Holiday Give Back.

The Idea

“The idea was brought to me by an OPO member who wanted an opportunity to work more closely and professionally with other members,” Community Manager Megan McKissen explains. “We partnered with the Community Council of St Charles County and created the OPO Holiday Give Back.”

For the holiday season, OPO members chose to donate their services to local non-profits. The Community Council then matched their skills with groups who had similar needs, and they worked together to create short, definable projects that would benefit the non-profits.

The Participants

Each organization received between 2-10+ hours of services like graphic design, consulting or SaaS. The idea was to gift the charity with technological needs from a provider with their best interest at heart. Each member company got the opportunity to give back to the broader community and infrastructure that supports their businesses as well as an opportunity to showcase their services and potentially broaden their markets.

Here’s a breakdown of the partnerships of OPO members and the participating non-profits:

• St. Louis Crisis Nursery received help with research from Industrial Strength Research and social media consulting from Snipe.
• Habitat for Humanity boosted their strategy and marketing consulting with aid from McKissen + Company.
• Charles Neighborhood Preservation Partnership benefitted from social media and visual presentation consulting from 3mbassy.
• ReStore St. Charles paired with Mark Neville of FINVR to receive assistance with their computer and web design.
• SHARE got help with graphic design from Design Me Stuff.
• Boys & Girls Club worked on their design and branding with help from The Karlen Group.
• Connections to Success received mentoring in business development from XLR8.
• Arise Equine Therapy received an animal related video ad from Miano.tv.
• KUTO (Kids Under Twenty) worked with Mark Bateman to finesse their WordPress website development and web installation.

Continuing to Build Community

Each of the non-profits were also invited to attend the OPO holiday party to further build the bridge between the two sectors within the community.

“The low key, happy hour affair was the perfect atmosphere for socializing and getting to know one another even better,”McKissen says. “And, of course, with it being St. Charles County, many of the groups already knew each other non-professionally! It was a great time.”

OPO has a strong commitment to area businesses and organizations. Creating opportunities to give back furthers their ongoing mission and serves as an example of the focus and values that the entrepreneurs of OPO are all about.