The Realist Idealist

At the end of the day, fundraising is the engine that drives the nonprofit sector. In general, if you’re running any organization - for-profit or non - and you’re not thinking about money, you’re wrong. With the overwhelmingly vast majority of nonprofits, if you’re not thinking about fundraising, you’re wrong.

Taking this into the 21st century, the advent of new free tools (as referenced throughout this blog and this one and many others) has made the operational infrastructure of many nonprofits/NGOs possible at very low or no (financial) cost. Similarly new (free) means for fundraising - particularly online - should make actually implementing a nonprofit’s ideas more doable and sustainable by bringing in additional revenue. It should mean that nonprofits generally have to think about it less. But while online fundraising has been a huge boost for many (and core to the existence of others), it’ s also probably fair to say that it hasn’t yet fulfilled it’s potential in “the sector” at large.

To move things forward more swiftly and raise awareness of online fundraising, the Case Foundation, Network for Good, and Global Giving recently conducted “America’s Giving Challenge,” which awarded $750,000 to 8 winners of an all-online competition. The aim was not to get the most money donated online, but rather to have the highest number of donors who gave $10 or more.

The contest was by almost any account a big success. The 8 winners (4 US orgs; 4 Int’l orgs), not only received tens of thousands of dollars from thousands of new online donors (who’s contact information they retain), but received $50,000 from Case on top of it. Thus, a small and young organization like Atlas Corp with a big idea ended up bringing in over $80,000, and is now able to expand more broadly into Latin America.

(One of the other interesting things about Scott’s efforts in particular at Atlas Corps is that he relied so strongly on Atlas Corp’s Facebook group‘ which had 850 or so members.)

The best piece about the contest came yesterday from contest’s international winner, Beth Kanter’s organization in Cambodia. Again, a great example of an organization leveraging the power of the social web, and an organization for whom these funds make a huge difference.

Here is Beth’s post: http://beth.typepad.com/beths_blog/2008/02/americas-giving.html