Holiday Watch: Musical Greetings of the Season and Virtual Fruitcakes

By NICOLE WALLACE
Features Editor

December 7, 2009 | Read Time: 1 minute

Companies’ holiday-giving promotions are in full swing online.

For each musical e-card that visitors send from the Fidelity FutureStage Web site through December 31, the financial-services company will donate $1 toward the purchase of new instruments for school music programs in need.

The animated greetings feature selections from leading orchestras. In one, skaters glide gracefully across a frozen pond, etching a violin-shaped pattern on the ice, accompanied by a Boston Pops performance of “Happy Holidays.”

The company hopes that visitors will send 500,000 cards during the promotion. Over the past three years, the company has donated more than 925 instruments, valued at more than $875,000, to 49 school and local music programs.
PayPal is counting on virtual fruitcakes to raise money this holiday season for 24 charities, including Architecture for Humanity, Boys & Girls Clubs of America, Share Our Strength, and St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.

The Internet-payments company is asking Facebook users to select one of the charities and create an electronic fruitcake to send to their friends and ask them to make a donation. The hope is that recipients will then “regift” the fruitcake through their social networks.

PayPal will award an additional $20,000 to the nonprofit group that raises the most money, $10,000 to the runner-up, and $5,000 to the third-place charity.

About the Author

NICOLE WALLACE

Features Editor

Nicole Wallace is features editor of the Chronicle of Philanthropy. She has written about innovation in the nonprofit world, charities’ use of data to improve their work and to boost fundraising, advanced technologies for social good, and hybrid efforts at the intersection of the nonprofit and for-profit sectors, such as social enterprise and impact investing.Nicole spearheaded the Chronicle’s coverage of Hurricane Katrina recovery efforts on the Gulf Coast and reported from India on the role of philanthropy in rebuilding after the South Asian tsunami. She started at the Chronicle in 1996 as an editorial assistant compiling The Nonprofit Handbook.Before joining the Chronicle, Nicole worked at the Association of Farmworker Opportunity Programs and served in the inaugural class of the AmeriCorps National Civilian Community Corps.A native of Columbia, Pa., she holds a bachelor’s degree in foreign service from Georgetown University.