Fortitudine Vincimus

We only had eight hours to create a website without any professional help. Do you think it’s possible?

While I was working on this project I imagine I felt a lot like Sir Ernest Shackleton did when he encountered unexpected problems. Shackleton wanted to be the first man to reach the South Pole but someone beat him to it. He then devised a more ambitious goal: Traverse Antarctica by land from coast to coast (an 1,800 mile journey). Misfortune struck Shackleton’s crew when his ship, Endurance, was frozen in ice (picture below) and had to be abandoned. Shackleton had to change his entire strategy and his new goal was to keep all of his crew alive.

After almost 500 days, they rowed in small life boats to a tiny, uninhabited island. Shackleton’s crew found temporary refuge on the small island, but they were still in mortal danger and needed to find rescue. Fortunately, all of Shackleton’s 55 crew members were still alive. Shackleton even gave his gloves to a crew member who lost his. The servant-leader suffered frostbite as a result.

Shackleton took five men with him in a small lifeboat to another island to find help. In their tiny boat, they braved hurricane-force winds without capsizing, even though a 500-ton steamer was sunk in the same storm. They then climbed a mountain for 36 hours without sleep, before finally sliding down a 2,000 foot drop and making it to safety. In the end, every one of his men survived.

It’s fitting that Shackleton’s family motto was Fortitudine Vincimus - "By Endurance We Conquer."

Building a website wasn’t a life or death experience for my team, but we did face some of the same dynamics Shackleton’s team did.

In 2007, Justice For All made the final steps to transition from a show-and-tell organization to a training organization. We used to focus primarily on showing our exhibit on college campuses, but now we are mentoring thousands of people every year to be pro-life ambassadors who use the exhibit to make their case against abortion.

Originally created in the early 2000’s, our website did not reflect this change and desperately needed a redesign. I was the project leader for the redesign team. I started working on the redesign in 2008 with a designer, but things didn’t work out. Then we worked with a professional company, but again, things fell through for reasons out of my control.

Three years passed and we still had the same website. This was pretty frustrating, and after awhile I stopped giving the project priority. My boss, Steve Wagner, encouraged me to get the process going again, and we devised a very ambitious and bold plan.

Four team members would create the entire webpage in only eight hours.

In order to accomplish this, we had to clearly define our expectations and intermediary goals. The new website was to be as simple as possible so long as it still communicated our message. Anything fancy had to go or be put on a list for the future. We used an Apple program called iWeb to quickly create the site.

Eight hours later, we had a nearly complete website. We didn’t reach our initial goal, but we had finished about 90% of the 11 pages we thought we needed. The next several days consisted of grammar editing and fine-tuning on the design, along with the creation of six additional pages.

I learned a lot by leading my team. I spent time with my team members before the actual creation of the pages to implement a strategy and a schedule that would keep us on track but also allow for unexpected problems. But the primary reason we were able to accomplish our goal was simply hard work. My team members all had their own genius to contribute, and I’m very proud of the work we did. Fortitudine Vincimus!

My Challenge for You: Will you share our new website with at least two friends and ask them to consider supporting me? Send them to www.jfaweb.org and ask them to go to the Meet The Mentors page. They can learn more about my professional work and hobbies and even financially support me. I’m currently at 64% of my support level and really working hard to get to 100% support. I appreciate your help!

Thank you,
Matt Mckinley