November 17, 2014 | Read Time: 2 minutes
Built on the seemingly infinite expanse of social media, the breadth and success of Giving Tuesday would seem to defy easy visualization.
But the online charity platform CrowdRise plans to do just that, with a virtual Giving Tower reaching to the sky.
A free app for smartphones, scheduled for launch November 25, will allow users to point their device at a dollar bill and create a hologram image of a tower. As the donations accumulate, the bricks will show photos of donors and their chosen charity. The images will be color-coded to indicate the donation amounts.
“I love Giving Tuesday,” says Robert Wolfe, CrowdRise CEO. “They’ve done such a powerful job, and they haven’t screwed it up. It lives all over the Internet.”
“We wanted to figure out how to really harness it in as cool a way as we could think of,” Wolfe says. “This is how the world is giving back. Let’s see something rise.”
Mr. Wolfe built a fortune as a co-founder of Moosejaw Mountaineering and appreciates the role Giving Tuesday serves as a counter to the Black Friday and Cyber Monday shopping days.
A video promoting the app shows the tower reaching to the sky and beyond. The success of Giving Tuesday seems equally impressive.
CrowdRise Giving Tower from CrowdRise on Vimeo.
Last year, Giving Tuesday generated $19-million in online donations, as tracked by Blackbaud. Network for Good, which also helped process online donations, tallied another $2-million. Meanwhile, the hashtag #GivingTuesday appeared 270,000 times on Twitter and reached nearly 2 billion followers, an increase of 338 percent over 2012.
More than 10,000 U.S. and international charities, corporations, schools, and business organizations have signed on to participate for the third Giving Tuesday, on December 2.
“What is so great about Giving Tuesday is that it combines innovative ways of giving back with a focus on our communities and the causes we care about most,” says Kathy Calvin, chief executive of the United Nations Foundation and one of the giving day’s founders. “CrowdRise’s tower does that creatively.”
