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Health & Fitness

Charity Spring Patch Digest: Win a $25K Pro Bono Marketing Campaign for Your Charity

Charity Spring Patch Digest for Tuesday, October 23, 2012

Patch Tips!

Did you know that your nonprofit can make as much use of The patch platform as you care to? Your own blog at The Patch is there for the blogging. Their traffic can be yours. Their readers such as riders on Metro North are going places such as corporate headquarters or home. Traditional and new media and especially social media have reinvented the way information flows through society. The volume, frequency, and diversity of influential voices have transformed “the press” to include a broad, diverse, real-time, and ever-changing group of voices -- including your nonprofit's voice. Once you are online you can be found, and let's not forget the power of internal corporate communications, which can reach new attentive readers and prospective donors with your stories. But you first need to make it easy for advocates to find you and then share your stories.

Fairfield County Funding Opportunities

Find out what's happening in Norwalkwith free, real-time updates from Patch.

The new Billionaire magazine, and its corresponding Billionaire.com website, reportedly dedicates approximately one-third of its content focus to philanthropy, and the publication recently pledged to donate $1 million to charity.

CharityBuzz.com can be your charity’s way (no matter how small)  to raise serious dollars, if you have access to a priceless (read celebrity) experiences and no intention or capacity to offer them at your own live auction gala. CharityBuzz has a worldwide constituency of wealthy bidders always checking in to see what only money can buy. It’s worth a look to see what others are raising there. You’ll see the most obscure charities thriving.

Find out what's happening in Norwalkwith free, real-time updates from Patch.

Fairfield County Charity & Donor News

Remember the Chase Community Giving Program, started in 2009 by JPMorgan Chase & Co.? It was one of the first experiments in using social media to engage charities and their supporters in a competition for grants. Ad Age reported that the initiative did not work out so well: “…the 2012 contest descended into chaos, capped by Chase’s bone-headed announcement of $10,000 prizes to 15 charities that didn’t get enough votes to win—apparently the result of a clerical mistake.” As the saying goes, no good intention goes unpunished.

Who missed the Global Poverty Project’s Global Citizen Festival in Central Park on the last Saturday in September? 60,000 attended to hear Neil Young, Foo Fighters, the Black Keys, Band of Horses and K’naan. Forbes reports the concert “became the largest syndicated charity concert in online and broadcast television history, generating over $500 million in pledges to combat poverty around the world.” The concert was supported by the grant making nonprofit Capital for Good and several other foundations, including the Pratt Foundation, the Sumner M. Redstone Foundation, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The takeaway from this is this: any best practices here a Fairfield County charity can replicate?

Donor Relations

Be Your Donor Day, October 24th, Network for Good’s effort to inspire nonprofits to place themselves in the role of their donors and rate how they are performing from the perspective of those supporters. The goal is to help nonprofits find and fix problems for their online donors ahead of giving season.

Corporate Social Responsibility 

Phil & Co., a New York City marketing agency for philanthropies and companies doing good, is launching a contest to reward a deserving charity with a $25,000 pro-bono marketing campaign. Called PHILfactor, the contest encourages the general public, with an emphasis on the philanthropy community, to submit descriptions of original and innovative non-profits and social enterprises they believe are deserving of a pro-bono marketing and advertising campaign.

Media Tips

Huffington Post, a member of the AOL (and The Patch) family, handles 70+ million comments a year! This surpasses their 2011 total of 54 million. Takeaway: The Patch family is a good place to be.

Social Media Tips

Smartphone Infographic.

Thought for the Day

Hence it is, that we every Day find Men in Conversation contending warmly on some Point in Politicks, which, altho’ it may nearly concern them both, neither of them understand any more than they do each other. – Ben Franklin (1729)

Is there growing recognition that for all its money (and research) the philanthropic world has done very little to stem the decline of civic well being? Does philanthropy itself exacerbate public cynicism and mistrust by pursuing its own ideas about advancing the common good without ever authentically inviting the common person to the table? When appeals for support hover about us all as persistently as angels, fashioned as they are by persons highly trained in the arts of blandishment, need we wonder why there has there has been no growth in philanthropy as a percentage of GDP (2%+/-) in the last 40+ years?

Charity Spring

See what nearly 2,800 people around the world are reading at Charity Spring (live since October 4th). For many additional links to help you build financial support and awareness for your Fairfield County cause see the Charity Spring Patch Digest homepage.

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