December 10, 2009 | Read Time: 2 minutes
Start a Web site, raise $14-million. Can it really be that easy?
Just two weeks after going live, GiveMN.org, a Web site that links donors with charities in Minnesota, held a special Give to the Max day on November 17. The promise of a match on every gift brought donors out in droves — 38,778 people gave more than $14-million to 3,434 Minnesota charities.
The site is the brainchild of the Minneapolis Foundation, a community foundation that joined with the St. Paul Foundation and the Bush Foundation to contribute a total of $500,000 in matching grants to the special giving day.
Give to the Max appears to be the most successful effort of its type to date. Similar giving days in Dallas, Pittsburgh, and Columbus, Ohio, during the past year raised $4-million or less.
GiveMN.org lists every Minnesota charity on its site, and the charities can contact GiveMN to add logos, pictures, and videos. Some 2,500 charities have personalized their profiles on the site — far more than the 500 charities that GiveMN had been expecting. “Once nonprofits understood the benefit to them, it spread like wildfire,” says Dana Nelson, GiveMN’s executive director.
Some charity leaders worried that Give to the Max day would not produce an increase in giving but simply draw in loyal donors who wanted to get their gifts matched, but initial reports indicate that the promotional day brought in a large percentage of new donors.
Second Harvest Heartland, a food bank that serves 59 counties in Minnesota and western Wisconsin, received the most gifts (more than 1,200) and the most cash ($185,000, plus a small match and a $5,000 prize for receiving the greatest number of gifts). That’s less than 2 percent of the charity’s annual fund-raising goal, but Joan Wadkins, a spokeswoman for the charity, says the long-term payoff could be much greater. The food bank estimates that 75 percent of the people who gave to the charity on the special day were new donors. “Clearly there was something galvanizing in the way that Give to the Max was presented,” Ms. Wadkins says.
