August 4, 2005 | Read Time: 2 minutes
Amazon.com has announced the 10 finalists for its Nonprofit Innovation Award, which honors creative approaches to solving social problems. Those organizations are now applying their creativity to finding ways to win the prize.
Together, Amazon and Stanford Business School’s Center for Social Innovation narrowed down a pool of nearly 1,000 applications to 25 semifinalists. A panel of judges — which included Muhammad Ali, Henry Kissinger, and Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder — then selected the 10 finalists.
Now those organizations are hoping to secure the top prize by urging their supporters to donate to them through the Amazon Web site. Between now and September 30, the organization that receives the most in online contributions — which can be up to $1,000 each — will win a matching grant from Amazon of up to $1-million. All organizations will get to keep the donations they receive during the course of the competition.
The 10 charities selected as finalists focus on poverty, both in the United States and abroad, children, education, and health care.
The organizations vying for the top prize are taking an array of approaches.
DonorsChoose, a group in New York that lets donors select and pay for special projects, materials, and field trips proposed by teachers in cash-strapped public schools, has devoted the front page of its Web site to news of the competition. In addition to a direct link to the organization’s donation page on Amazon, the site also lets visitors send information about the competition to friends and family members via e-mail.
San Francisco’s Earned Assets Resource Network, or EARN, is working with two local television stations that the charity hopes will run stories about its participation in the contest. The organization, which has a staff of six full-time employees, provides money-management training to help people move out of poverty, and encourages savings by offering accounts in which deposits are matched.
The charity has also, like many of the other finalists, sent e-mail messages to its supporters asking them to make a donation — and to help spread the word by forwarding the messages to others.
“Definitely we see this as a little bit of a long shot for us because we’re so small,” says Sabrina L. Qutb, the group’s communications and development manager. “But it’s important that we play to win and reach out to as many folks as we can.”
To get to the list of finalists: Go to http://www.amazon.com/nonprofitinnovation.
