With creative online giving campaigns, everyone’s a philanthropist

Photo by DavidDMuir

As the end of 2009 draws near, nonprofits are standing at the ready with their year-end fundraising campaigns and are largely wondering the same thing: what impact will the tumultuous economy have on charitable giving? There are many schools of thought out there, and perhaps the most common is that we’re in uncharted territory, and it’s anyone’s guess. While that may be true, it’s not overly reassuring. One thing we do know is that we’ve never seen online giving campaigns quite like what we’re seeing sprout up this holiday season.

For those of you who are regular readers of the Case Foundation’s blog, you’ll know that (together with Causes on Facebook and PARADE) we just wrapped up our most recent America’s Giving Challenge, resulting in more than 106,000 individual donations that helped to raise more than $2.1 million for nonprofit organizations in just 30 days. For us, America’s Giving Challenge was about empowering individual donors to recognize their potential as philanthropists. After all, modest donations of ten or $25 can add up in a major way.

While our 2007-2008 Giving Challenge was the first national online giving competition of its kind, we have been excited to see so many new and innovative examples follow suit. Just this week there are two new campaigns we wanted to spotlight. Each offers its own twist on engaging a wide range of participants, and each is focused on ensuring the money benefits local or regional nonprofits.

GiveMN – Give to the Max Day

GiveMN is a new online giving platform to encourage Minnesotans to give and help create a strong and vibrant nonprofit community for their state. Now, before saying just how much Minnesota raised in its first day (Give to the Max Day) it’s worth noting just how civically engaged Minnesotans already are. They rank off the charts when it comes to civic engagement such as voting and volunteering, and in just a 24 hour period they raised more than $14M as part of Give to the Max Day. In fact, we’re learning the program was so successful that they had to backtrack on the promise of a match (which started out dollar-for-dollar up to $500,000, and then was going to be 50 cents for every dollar, up to $500,000, and is now "a portion of every dollar") all because of the overwhelming response. This is certainly an interesting lesson in attempting to predict the success of unprecedented online experiments.

GiveMN is powered by the giving platform Razoo, and offers a simple, secure way for Minnesotans to browse the site and make a donation to a nonprofit of their choice. And if they care to take it a step further, they have an opportunity to launch their own fundraiser for an organization. We’ll be watching with great interest as the campaign evolves.

Chase’s Your Communities, Your Vote

On the corporate philanthropy front, starting this week, Facebook users have an opportunity to vote for local charities and non-profits, and help direct Chase corporate philanthropic dollars to eligible organizations in the areas of: education, healthcare, housing, the environment, combating hunger, arts and culture, human services, and animal welfare. The grassroots campaign aims to inspire a new way of corporate philanthropy.

Visitors can type in their zip code or the name of a local charity and then each individual Facebook user gets 20 votes for the organization of their choice. One catch, you do have to “fan” the Chase Community Giving page in order to participate. But it’s a small price to pay to help direct money to a cause you care about. They'll be using a tiered voting system with the eligible charity receiving the most votes being awarded $1 million, the top five runners-up will receive $100,000 each, and the 100 finalists, including the top winners, will each be awarded $25,000.

The power of micro-donations is a game changer, it’s making each of us philanthropists. Yet, still very few of us consider ourselves “philanthropists” – we don’t like that word or we don’t think it applies to what we’re doing. But when you think about it, a philanthropist is simply someone who cares about a cause, and uses what they have to help. And now there are more ways than ever for people to exercise this power.

What are some of the most creative fundraising approaches you’re seeing as we enter the holiday season? We’d like to feature other innovative approaches to every day philanthropy in the coming weeks, so leave them in comments and happy giving!

Tags: AGC chase GiveMN giving giving challenge