5 Reasons Why Giving Back’s Important

As a nerd, I really believe in giving back (always have). It’s important to collaborate, help one another, and create the change we want, and that takes time.

Earlier this year, the craigconnects team and I created an infographic, Cracking the Crowdfunding Code, to show you just how effective and accessible crowdfunding is. Crowdfunding raised more than five billion dollars worldwide in 2013, and peer-to-peer nonprofit fundraising for charities is seeing explosive growth. Just a couple months ago, #GivingTuesday raised over $45 million in just one day – talk about giving back.

Here’s why it’s critical that we give back to our communities:

The vast majority of people anywhere don’t usually have much of a voice or any influence. Usually, regular people, the grassroots, only manage to acquire power when they use technology to work together. The technology enables people to magnify their team power, acting as a force multiplier (code really is power). They can get people to the streets, and raise money. Giving back means giving people a voice. Long term, I want to figure out how to give a voice, using the internet, to everyone on the planet. This also means we need to speak up when something’s not right.
When we work together to give back, we create stronger networks. Silos are inevitable, unfortunately. Do what you can to identify silos, and decide where you want your ambitions to go (my opinion? this is the best way to hack your career). Might be happier to find the people who want to do the job well. We can’t make change from the top down. The president’s the most powerful person in the world, but not that powerful. What’s powerful is when people in the trenches work together to get things done, and that’s what makes a difference
We seem to throw money into food and housing, yet a lot of folks are still in need, so something isn’t working right. This includes military families and veterans. We need to do it better. (See: 5 reasons we need social change…)
I’m kind of tired of passion. But the deal is, you really want commitment from people when they’re giving back. You want the excitement, but then they need to follow through. Following through is the hard part, and that’s what’s important. Instead of passion or excitement, alone, we need to incorporate commitment and results. People can get excited about something, realize it’s hard, then that passion might now count for anything. In short? Follow through with your passion, truly carry out your mission and show your community the results.

Any influence I get, well, I just don’t need or really want; I’ve got what I need, like a really good shower and my own parking place. Instead, I use the influence I do get on behalf of the stuff I believe in. You’ll see me either pushing the good work of people who get stuff done, or indulging my sense of humor. (Note to self: I’m not as funny as I think I am.)

To be sure, I don’t feel this is altruistic or noble, it’s just that a nerd’s gotta do what a nerd’s gotta do.

Final note to self: JUST LISTEN. That is, don’t ALWAYS attempt to solve the problem, SOMETIMES YOU JUST NEED TO LISTEN. (Courtesy of “You Just Don’t Understand” by Deborah Tannen.)

December 24, 2014

How #GivingTuesday Raised Over $45million

Folks, I support #GivingTuesday each year because it’s the real deal. I got an update from Henry Timms… More data and stories are still coming in, but here are the highlights as they stand right now (more soon!):

Indiana University is estimating an overall 63% increase this year in online donations.

Early results from Blackbaud show a 159% increase in online donations from the first #GivingTuesday in 2012.

Network for Good processed more than double the donation total from last year.

20,000 partners participated in all US states – partners included nonprofits, local business and corporations working to benefit causes they care about, student groups, etc.

There were over 40 local communities across the US (states, cities and counties) joined together in the spirit of civic pride. The Maryland Gives More statewide #GivingTuesday campaign, alone, raised $8.3 million for local causes.

There were over 6,700 global partners participating, with #GivingTuesday activities taking place in 68 countries from Armenia to Mongolia to Wales. There were 7 countries and 2 regions leading localized #GivingTuesday movements including Australia, Brazil (#diadedoar), Canada, Ireland, Israel, Latin America (#undiaparadar), New Zealand, Singapore, and the United Kingdom.

There were over 32 million Twitter impressions with 700,000 hashtag mentions. #GivingTuesday was trending no. 1 in both the US and UK.

President Barack Obama released a special #GivingTuesday message and Prime Minister David Cameron voiced his support. Other notable names who gave their support of #GivingTuesday range from Malala to Melinda Gates to Matthew McConaughey.

H.Res. 761 recognizing #GivingTuesday was introduced in congress this November. The #GivingTuesday resolution recognizes that philanthropy and charitable giving knows no party divide, as giving has the ability to transcend any differences of political ideologies and has the power to unite people across boundaries.

Every major religion participated with people of all backgrounds, religions, and ethnic groups celebrating #GivingTuesday.

And here’s an infographic from the Case Foundation about the successes of #GivingTuesday:

Did you give this year? (You can still give over on CrowdRise’s #GivingTower Holiday Challenge…)

December 5, 2014

What “New Power” Means for #GivingTuesday

History keeps getting itself made, and now and then, regular people get a chance at sharing power. Jeremy Heimans and Henry Timms articulated this much more eloquently in Understanding “New Power”.

I’m pretty passionately committed to this for at least the next twenty years, have already been practicing it daily for the last twenty years.

Here’s my nerdly take on the thing:

Recently, we saw the British, American, and French revolutions each spread power around to different ends. In the UK and US, we got different forms of representative democracy, but in France, we got some rather unpleasant mob rule, later evolving into representative democracy.

For sure, in the US, democracy is increasingly centralizing toward a moneyed class willing to pay legislatures for results, that’s the whole Citizens United thing.

That’s also with Heimans and Timms call “old power”:

Old power works like a currency. It is held by few. Once gained, it is jealously guarded, and the powerful have a substantial store of it to spend. It is closed, inaccessible, and leader-driven. It downloads, and it captures.

Previous revolutions aspired to what these guys call “new power” and I’m very hopeful we can get there:

New power operates differently, like a current. It is made by many. It is open, participatory, and peer-driven. It uploads, and it distributes. Like water or electricity, it’s most forceful when it surges. The goal with new power is not to hoard it but to channel it.

Power, as British philosopher Bertrand Russell defined it, is simply “the ability to produce intended effects.” Old power and new power produce these effects differently. New power models are enabled by peer coordination and the agency of the crowd—without participation, they are just empty vessels. Old power is enabled by what people or organizations own, know, or control that nobody else does—once old power models lose that, they lose their advantage.

This doesn’t say that new power involves no rules, like at the worst of the French Revolution. It’s not okay, for example, to “appropriate” (steal) anyone else’s stuff. We can, and already do better than that.

Anyone can share in this evolving power by participating, by making a genuine contribution, and there’re a lot of ways to do that.

One way that’s getting a bit of attention involves a new way to contribute to effective nonprofits, via CrowdRise and #GivingTuesday.

Everyone can pitch in, and work with each other.

This is just a start, helping people in the here and now, and getting ready for lots more.

Are you ready?

November 25, 2014

Tis the Season to Give Back

Folks, I believe that it’s really important to give back to our communities. One way to do that is to participate in CrowdRise’s #GivingTuesday Holiday Challenge for nonprofits. I’m giving $50K to go toward the winner of the Challenge, and together, with the other donors, there will be $250K in prize money.

CrowdRise has been working hard to make this Challenge and #GivingTuesday bigger then past years. One way they’re doing that is by creating a Giving Tower. It’s going to be a hologram tower. Each time someone donates, a brick is added to the tower. You can actually download an app and point it at a dollar bill to see how the tower’s growing. Here’s a little more about it:

The Giving Tower Holiday Challenge is a great way for organizations to rally their supporters, raise money for their cause, drive engagement, get lots of exposure and, most importantly, raise money for their cause (note intentional repetition). The Challenge is friendly fundraising competition launched by craigconnects, Fred and Joanne Wilson, and MacAndrews & Forbes. It’s designed to help you raise awareness and lots of money for your year end fundraising.

Here’s more about the Challenge this year:

The Challenge starts on November 25th and there are going to be huge grand prizes, plus lots of Bonus Challenges. The campaign is always amazing and last year, charities rallied to raise over $2.3m for their causes.

There will be $250,000 in prizes this year. The organization that raises the most will receive a $100,000 donation to their cause. Second place will win $50,000, third $25,000, fourth $10,000 and fifth place will receive a $5,000 donation to their cause.

There will also be multiple opportunities along the way to get extra cash donations in the form of Bonus Challenges. Folks, we’re talking an extra $60,000 in Bonus Challenges.

The good folks over at CrowdRise are hosting a webinar on November 20th at 3pm ET to walk you through everything about the Challenge, please Click Here to register.

So far, there’s more than 500 charities signed up, and plenty of time for you to sign up, too.

The Toolkit will tell you everything else you need to know that I may have forgotten.

Use the hashtag #GivingTower to continue the conversation.

Looking forward to getting this Challenge started, more to come…

November 21, 2014

Infographic Reveals Latest Data on Cracking the Crowdfunding Code

It’s the third anniversary of craigconnects, and we’ve really tried to bring good people together to raise money for their nonprofits. We did a lot of support through crowdfunding, and to celebrate, the craigconnects team and I created an infographic, Cracking the Crowdfunding Code, to show you just how effective and accessible crowdfunding is. Crowdfunding raised more than five billion dollars worldwide in 2013, and peer-to-peer nonprofit fundraising for charities is seeing explosive growth.

A few things that we discovered after researching crowdfundings impact on charities and interviewing prominent crowdfunding platforms such as Causes, Causevox, FirstGiving, Razoo, StayClassy, etc:

Over 28% of donors on crowdfunding platforms are repeat donors.

Fundraisers who use a video raise 2x more than those without videos.

More than $19M online donations were processed on #GivingTuesday in 2013.

Over $9,000 on average is raised on nonprofit campaign crowdfunding pages.

Other infographic findings detail various crowdfunding results such as the average online donation to campaigns, more data on the success of the crowdfunding initiative #GivingTuesday, and best practices of nonprofits that have raised a significant amount of money with this newer fundraising tool.

Folks, I’ve worked on four crowdfunding campaigns myself in the past three years, and I’m pretty pleased with the results. The campaigns included two that raised funds for vets and milfam organizations, another for Hurricane Sandy relief, and the Holiday Challenge that was open to all nonprofits. I’ve teamed up with prominent crowdfunding platforms to promote the campaigns and have donated prize money for the orgs that raise the most in order to stimulate competition and success. The campaigns I’ve worked on have raised an estimated total of $2.6 million.

I began the craigconnects initiative in March 2011 to organize my efforts to help support nonprofits working in my areas of focus. Crowdfunding’s a natural fit for craigconnects’ efforts to promote the use of tech for the public good because it involves grassroots efforts and involvement. I’m not much for top-down stuff. I only understand bottom-up stuff.

Please check out the infographic, and share it if you think it’s helpful.

March 19, 2014

Unbelievable: Over $2 Million Dollars Raised for Nonprofits

Hey there, the CrowdRise #HolidayChallenge just ended on Thursday, and you won’t believe how much the organizations raised collectively in small donations for their nonprofits: $2,394,827, more than double last year’s total for the Vets Challenge.

Yup, that’s right, over two million dollars. Plus, I gave $75k, in grand and weekly bonus prizes and that money was distributed between several nonprofits who are really getting the job done.

A much-deserved congratulations to all of the nonprofits who really had their boots on the ground doing good work. Especially the top three winners:

Cure JM Foundation came in first place, winning the Holiday Challenge. The total amount that they raised and won was nearly $400,000 to help advance Juvenile Myositis (JM) research, a rare and life-threatening autoimmune condition affecting mostly children.
US Friends of the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust won 2nd place ($40k prize) by raising $133,576 to support care for orphaned elephants in Africa.
Hope and Opportunity Through Literacy won 3rd place ($20k prize) by raising $111,114 to support education and health programs for the poor living in Central America, South America, the Caribbean, Africa, Portugal, and the United States.

These nonprofits couldn’t have raised over $2 million dollars without your help, so a big thank you and congratulations to everyone who participated, and to all the good folks over there at CrowdRise, Huffington Post, and the other philanthropists who are really making a difference.

Thank you again for making this happen, folks. A nerd’s gotta do what a nerd’s gotta do.

January 11, 2014

Do eCommerce Giving Programs Effectively Raise Money for Charity?

Hey, the idea behind craigconnects is giving the voiceless a real voice, and the powerless real power. I see it as everyone doing some small, or big, part.

One way to do this is by giving back via purchases and a few key initiatives. Organizations like We-Care.com team up with merchants and give a percentage of the proceeds to charity. We-Care works with more than 2500 online merchants, and it’s the merchants who choose what percentage of proceeds to donate (ranging from 1.5% to 15% of transactions). Participation doesn’t cost anything for the organizations, and there is no extra charge for the person who is shopping. Something that’s really useful on We-Care is their toolbar plugin. You can download a reminder that will pop up each time you’re shopping on a site that will give some money to your cause.

Amazon just started doing something similar to We-Care, but aren’t giving as much (just 0.5%). They’re calling it AmazonSmile.

Perla Ni, CEO of Great Nonprofits commented on Amazon’s new giving program, and what she calls “interesting benchmarks” –

“0.5% is an interesting percentage. Amazon’s revenue was $17B last quarter. It would be $80M/quarter if everybody who purchased something took it up. Even though it doesn’t cost anyone to do it, say 20% of users sign up, so that would be $20M/quarter. That would be about $80M/year donated to nonprofits. Google gives about $100M/year and Wells Fargo gives about $300M/year.”

Efforts like these are making donations an every day thing, and this way, according to Perla, “nonprofits may see donations through-out the year, rather than just at the end of the year for tax-deductions.” Perla does voice a concern though. She says: “the biggest potential downside I see is that it may cannibalize individual giving – ‘oh, I don’t need to give on my own, because I’ve already done it just by shopping.’ It may make shopping replace giving.”

We also contacted Ken Berger, President and CEO of Charity Navigator, about AmazonSmile to get his opinion. He said that Charity Navigator will be looking into the project to see if Amazon will use their API to display the Charity Navigator ratings.

Ken also shared with us that “shopping portals that give money to charity usually don’t generate enough revenue to make a big impact on an individual charity’s bottom line. One of the problems is the change of behavior required – same as with Amazon since customers will have to start their purchase process on a different website than the regular Amazon site. However, the scale of Amazon makes this a unique proposition with the potential to make a big impact on a charity’s bottom line.”

I think the most helpful thing you can do to make sure you’re giving to the good guys is to check out Guidestar, Charity Navigator, and Great Nonprofits (like Yelp for nonprofits, with user reviews). These will help you select good, effective nonprofits.

I support some nonprofits, and some not (more on that here). I make sure to look into a charity before I donate to avoid giving to one of America’s 50 worst charities. It’s useful to be able to give back to orgs that I support via purchases that I’m already making. Although, I don’t think that shopping should replace giving to an org when you believe in their cause.

How are you giving back, if you’re able?

November 7, 2013

Will you #Hoot2Give this Holiday season?

Hey there – here’s the deal: my team and I worked with the good folks at National Wildlife Federation this past summer to help raise money for their org (with #Squirrels4Good & @common_squirrel). It’s about that time of year when birds are migrating and changing their nesting habits, and we really want to continue helping out the good folks at NWF and the little critters. Since the birds will be out and about, it may not be a big deal to just snap a picture of them.

We want you to #Hoot2Give for the holidays. Each time you share a photo of a bird (maybe an owl) or describe one you have just seen, and use the hashtag #Hoot2Give, I’ll give $1 to NWF, up to $5k.

I see birds (and squirrels) every day in my backyard (there’s often a bird party at Craig’s house), and you’ve probably seen my photos on Facebook or Twitter. I’m guessing you see birds too, and I’d love for you to share them for a good cause. I’d like you to join me, and #Hoot2Give to raise money for NWF. You can give us a hoot on Facebook, Twitter (@craignewmark), and my #Hoot2Give Pinterest board.

I’m not an outdoorsman, I’m just a nerd who’d really like to see some good bird pictures – and maybe even some hooting videos. NWF offered to take me owling, but I won’t have a chance to get to Washington, DC – so I hope that some of you have some good owl photos to share! Will you #Hoot2Give to raise some money for NWF this holiday season?

December 13, 2012