This year, See3 is playing an active role in Tweetsgiving 2009, a global celebration that seeks to change the world through the power of gratitude. Last year, Tweetsgiving raised $10,000 to build a classroom in Tanzania. But as the story behind Tweetsgiving demonstrates, the real focus is not to raise money but to share gratitude all across the web.
Over the next few days, we’re encouraging folks to create a short video of themselves expressing what they’re thankful for this year. All you have to do is upload it to YouTube, tag it with “Tweetsgiving”, and include the tweetsgiving.org URL in your video description.
Watch the instructional video below, as well as three Tweetsgiving videos made by members of the See3 staff.
If you missed your opportunity to donate to a nonprofit on Facebook during “America’s Giving Challenge”, which raised more than $1 million from more than 50,000 donations in 3 weeks, you now have another chance to give on Facebook.
· For the first time ever, Facebook users will be able to choose from more than 500,000 small and local charities to decide which community organizations they want to receive donations totaling millions of dollars from a corporate philanthropy fund.
· Facebook users, now totaling more than 300 million, will be able to vote for which small and local non profits will receive donations totaling $5 million
· The eligible charity receiving the most votes will be awarded $1 million, the top five runners-up will receive $100,000 each and the 100 finalists, including the top winners, will be awarded $25,000 each
· This $5 million Facebook effort is in addition to the bank’s traditional philanthropic giving, and if successful, the bank hopes to commit more of its annual philanthropy funds using this innovative method of giving.
We’ve already seen a lot of people casting their votes on Facebook, so now it’s your turn!
America’s Giving Challenge is an amazing program from The Case Foundation that See3 had the opportunity to support this year. It is a program that encourages nonprofits, large and small, to use the web to engage people in their work, and to encourage small donations. They make this happen through a competition that rewards nonprofits daily during the contest period and overall at the end. Today they just announced that the W.K. Kellogg Foundation added another $75,000 to the pot to give away.
W.K. Kellogg Foundation Grant to America’s Giving Challenge Significantly Increases Number of Overall and Daily Awards Offered to Nonprofit Causes
Challenge Has Already Raised $1.1 million from More Than 50K Donations in Three Weeks;
Runs through November 6
WASHINGTON, D.C. (October 30, 2009) – America’s Giving Challenge, a 30-day, national online competition that encourages people to leverage their social networks to recruit supporters and win cash awards for nonprofit organizations, today announced that it has received a $75,000 grant from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation of Battle Creek, Michigan to help mobilize participation in the last week of the Challenge.
The grant increases the total amount of award dollars in the Challenge to $245,000 for nonprofit causes that net the highest number of donations. America’s Giving Challenge, presented by the Case Foundation, Causes and PARADE Publications, launched on October 7, 2009. To date more than 50,000 donations have raised $1.1 million for nonprofit causes.
“America’s Giving Challenge offers a tremendous opportunity to raise funds and awareness for nonprofit organizations at a time when the communities we care about, including children and families, have never been in greater need of their services,” said Anne Mosle, vice president for programs at the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. “We hope that collaborating with our colleagues in these efforts will not only encourage more innovation by all the participants in their fundraising efforts, but ultimately spark a larger movement of nonprofits leveraging technology to reach new audiences and inspire civic action.”
The $75,000 contribution from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation will enable the creation of five additional overall awards, including one $25,000 and four $10,000 prizes for the causes that garner the most unique daily donations over the 30 days of the Challenge. In addition, a $1,500 daily prize will be added for the last seven days of the Challenge beginning at 3 p.m. ET today. With the additional contribution, America’s Giving Challenge now offers 12 overall awards: one $50,000 prize, two $25,000 prizes and nine $10,000 prizes, and three daily awards of $1,500, $1,000 and $500.
Individuals and nonprofits can still get involved in America’s Giving Challenge. From now until November 6 at 3 p.m. ET, participants can compete for daily and overall awards – ranging from $500 to $50,000 – based on the number of donations to their cause using the Causes application on Facebook. Those who wish to participate in the Challenge can get involved in one of two ways:
• Champion a cause – Individuals can become “cause champions,” who are passionate about a specific cause and will compete to obtain the most donations for their cause through the Causes application on Facebook.
• Promote, donate or join a cause – all individuals are encouraged to take part in America’s Giving Challenge by joining, promoting and donating to the causes they care about. Facebook membership is not required to donate to a Giving Challenge cause.
Participants can register to compete in the Giving Challenge, view details and donate to a cause they care about at www.americasgivingchallenge.com.
About the W.K. Kellogg Foundation
Established in 1930, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation supports children, families and communities as they strengthen and create conditions that propel vulnerable children to achieve success as individuals and as contributors to the larger community and society. Grants are concentrated in the United States, Latin American and the Caribbean, and southern Africa.
About the Presenting Partners:
The Case Foundation
The Case Foundation, created by Steve and Jean Case in 1997, invests in people and ideas that can change the world. The Foundation champions initiatives that connect people, increase giving, and catalyze civic action. For more information, visit www.casefoundation.org.
Causes
Causes empowers anyone with a good idea or passion for change to impact the world. Using our platform, individuals mobilize their network of friends to grow lasting social and political movements. To date, over 85 million Facebook users have installed the application and created and joined more than 300,000 grassroots causes that benefit more than 60,000 nonprofit organizations in the U.S. and Canada. For more information, visit the Causes Application (www.causes.com) and Causes Exchange (www.exchange.causes.com).
PARADE
PARADE, the most widely read magazine in America, is distributed in more than 500 of the nation’s top newspapers. The magazine, which launched in 1941, now has a circulation of 32 million and a readership of 73 million. Each Sunday in PARADE and every day at Parade.com, our mission is to entertain, inspire and inform Americans about the issues they care most about and move them to action. For more information, visit www.parade.com.
Shirley Sexton, our Director of Interactive Marketing & Fundraising, recently hosted a webinar, “What Donors Want This End of Year Season”.
Below is the slidedeck to the presentation, which you should feel free to share within your networks. We will be adding the audio portion shortly, and in the meantime, feel free to send an email to info (at) see3 (dot) net with your questions.
[This piece was originally posted as part of “Video Week” on Care2’s Frogloop blog. Thanks to Allyson Kapin and the Frogloop team for inviting us to participate.]
I used to be quite the curmudgeon about online video back in the day—ask anyone I worked with in the late nineties at AppNet’s Nonprofit practices or later in the early 2000s as the head of the Internet group at Easter Seals. My reasons were simple… the technology just wasn’t ready yet. Too much could potentially go wrong, and I’m very careful (some might say paranoid!) about make sure there’s never any interruption in the donor’s online giving usability path.
1. Back then, a majority of our client’s constituents didn’t have broadband on their computers.
2. Problems abounded creating the right versions for cross players, browsers and accessible versions.
3. The video equipment was expensive and difficult to use.
But oh! what a difference a few years make! Now I’m a fan! And why?
3. The low cost Flip video camera and other new technology is democratizing video making.
So now that all those pesky technical obstacles are out of the way, now what?
Now it’s all about the content. And wasn’t it always, really?
Video is the next best thing to being there. How many times have you (or your development director) said, if only our donors could be here in our service centers, meet the people we’re serving, see the needs first hand. Video is a wonderful tool to help with that storytelling.
Storytelling with video can be a wonderful way of explaining a difficult or overwhelming concept. Watch the moving video above about one family’s experience with Trisomy 18 and see how it helps us understand the condition, the need for support and research, all through the story of this one little boy.
It is not an every day occurrence that I hear about a project and think — that’s firkin’ brilliant. But at the Cause Marketing Forum a few weeks ago I was looking over the attendee list to the workshop where I spoke and saw that someone was listed as being from Movember. I thought to myself, “self, this has to be a mistake, it must be November.” I saw the name again and thought to myself, “self, this isn’t a mistake, you have to look it up.” So I did look it up.
Movember is an organization that gets men around the world to grow a mustache during the month of November and to treat this activity as a fundraising event, the same way you would treat a run, walk or ride event for a charity. At the end of the month they have parties where the participants dress up as their favorite mustachiod stars — think Tom Selleck.
I know what you are thinking. That’s fun and cute. Oh, and by the way, they raised $30 million.
That’s no type-o. And they are just getting started. I was so taken with this idea that I called the founder of the organization Adam Garone. Adam is Australian and started Movember with some buddies in 2003, kind of as a joke. A “mo” is short for a mustache in the Australian language, and so November could become Movember. They had 30 friends do it that first year. They got grief from their bosses and girlfriends but they wanted to keep doing it. So they added the charity component and no one can argue with that.
In 2004 they approached the Prostate Cancer Foundation in Australia because the connection to men’s health was obvious and they felt prostate cancer didn’t get the attention that it should get. They raised $55,000 that first year and were the largest single donor to the foundation. They are literally changing the face of men’s health.
The idea has grown rapidly in Australia and they have raised more than $20 million there. They then added New Zealand, and came to the US in 2006. They are just getting started here. This year, they are partnering with both the Lance Armstrong Foundation, for testicular cancer, and they continue their affiliation with the Prostate Cancer Foundation. I expect this organization to reach $100 million annually in a few year.
They are very focused on cause marketing as well with US sponsors including Pepsi Max, Canadian Club, Wahl, Quicksilver, DC Shoes, Warner Bros. and others. The parties they have at the end of the year rock and they give prizes for the best mustaches.
What is particularly brilliant about this concept is that when I start to grow my mustache in November, people are going to say, “What’s that dirt on your face?” or “Have you given up your day job for that porn career?” or “Are the Villiage People recruiting?” I will then have to explain why prostate and testicular cancers are in need of research dollars and more public attention. Talk about viral.
Learn more about Movember and, for you men, plan on joining me in growing that mustache in November for men’s health.
Some famous folks with a mustache that you can dress up as for the Movember party.
The Giving USA Foundation’s annual report on charitable giving said that gifts were down in 2008, but not by much, 2%. Given the economic mess — the worst since the Depression — this sounds pretty good. And, overall, it is.
But the overall number of 2% down hides the differences within the numbers. For example, get-out-the-vote work was counted and was way up because of the historic election last year. Gifts to United Way and others who aggregate giving to mostly local, mostly poverty-focused work was up as well. Religious giving was way up as well.
But other categories got hammered. Arts, environment, health and education — is that all? — were all down. All is not rosy.
Remember, the research says don’t talk too much about the economy. People want to support winners, not those desperate for cash. The actionable intelligence from this report is this: Tell your stories. Find your best stories and work extra hard to tell them to your potential donors. It’s the stories of people and their real lives that get people writing checks and clicking on your donate button.
More on this story from Blackbaud, which analyzed the data. They have some nice graphs. They show online giving is way up.
Online Giving Surpasses $15 Billion in 2008
Blackbaud analyzed the Giving USA data, along with other important metrics, and estimates that more than $15.42 billion was given online to US charities in 2008. This is a 44% increase over 2007’s online giving estimates. Online giving accounted for just over 5% of total giving to charities in the US during 2008 and has been growing for many years now.
