Online Fund-Raising Contests Reap Big Wins for Small Charities

An Oklahoma charity that aids orphaned Chinese children, an animal-rescue group in New Jersey, and an organization that fights children’s epilepsy are among the top winners of a pair of online fund-raising contests designed to demonstrate the power of large numbers of small donations.

The competitions, financed by the foundation created by Steve Case, founder of AOL, and his wife, Jean, promised $50,000 grand prizes to nonprofit groups with the greatest number of donors to their cause, not the largest amount raised. In all, the Case Foundation handed out $750,000 in awards.

Two Competitions

Both contests were held from December 13 to January 31. “America’s Giving Challenge” was run with help from Parade magazine and its Web site. It promoted the use of electronic donation links, often called badges, that can be attached to e-mail messages or Web sites. That contest focused on bringing offline readers to online giving, and sought to reach the older adults who read Parade.

Participants in the second competition, “Causes Giving Challenge,” raised money and awareness for their causes through the social-networking Web site Facebook, which serves a younger audience.

Altogether, about 3,100 charities competed in the contest — 2,500 via Facebook and 600 through Parade — and received more than $1.7-million from about 80,000 people.

Small Charities

Many of the winners were very small grass-roots organizations that were able to garner more support than bigger, well-established groups. Ms. Case, chief executive officer of the Case Foundation, said her organization was pleased to see that small groups were able to compete.

While the Case Foundation is still studying the results of the challenges and will publicize its findings, some of the small organizations that succeeded say they were able to take advantage of powerful individual stories, impassioned volunteers, and large online networks of friends and colleagues to attract donors.

The Love Without Boundaries Foundation, an Oklahoma all-volunteer group that provides humanitarian aid to Chinese orphans, won the Causes Giving Challenge and a $50,000 prize. The $25,000 second-place award in the Facebook contest was Students for a Free Tibet, in New York. Third prize and $25,000 went to Nourish International, a group in Chapel Hill, N.C., that recruits college students to serve poor communities and encourages social responsibility.

Ten other organizations that ranked just behind those groups won $10,000 apiece through the competition. Those groups worked on a range of causes, such as voter education, advocating for an end to legalized abortion, and AIDS treatment. Additionally, each day of the competition the foundation awarded prizes of $1,000 to the group with the greatest number of donors that day.

“It doesn’t matter the brand of the nonprofit, it matters how compelling the story,” said Joe Green, co-founder of Causes, an eight-month-old effort to help charities use Facebook to reach potential supporters.

He said that many of the grass-roots groups “jumped into the platform and tried a lot of creative stuff” to win donors and gain a lead over wealthier organizations. Some groups took their fund-raising efforts offline, using phone trees and presenting their causes in classrooms at universities.

“This is not about blasting a lot of people” with mass e-mail messages, he said. “This is about people one on one. It’s about conversations.”

Mr. Green added that the Causes contest demonstrated how charities can successfully solicit gifts from young people, many of whom have never given money before.

“We believe that if you create the right structures for people to give, they’ll do it,” he said.

National Winners

America’s Giving Challenge, the promotion with Parade magazine, awarded $50,000 each to the four national organizations and four internationally oriented organizations that attracted the most donors, and $1,000 each to the next 100 charities.

Nationally, the $50,000 winners were Engineers Without Borders, in Longmont, Colo.; the Fanconi Anemia Research Fund, in Eugene, Ore.; the IDEA League, in Afton, Minn.; and the 11th Hour Animal Rescue, in Rockaway, N.J. Engineers Without Borders, which helps needy communities worldwide with engineering projects and education, had the most donors — 2,979 people gave $60,655.

Among the internationally focused groups, Route Out of Poverty for Cambodian Children, in Concord, Mass., won a top prize from America’s Giving Challenge for bringing in the most donations, 1,650. The other groups that won $50,000 each were Students Helping Honduras, in Fredericksburg, Va.; Atlas Service Corps, in Washington; and Friends of Burkina Faso, also in Washington.

Karen Maunu, medical director of Love Without Boundaries, said her organization is thrilled to discover Facebook as a new way to raise money.

Nearly all of the organization’s operations are conducted online, with volunteers around the United States and internationally.

A large portion of supporters had never used Facebook, Ms. Maunu said, so her group helped them set up accounts and make donations.

She said that her organization posted appeals to donate to the Case challenge on its Yahoo e-mail-group lists and blog, and that “people used unique ways” to encourage friends to give: College students canvassed every floor of their dormitory buildings; a nurse brought her laptop to work to recruit her co-workers; a middle school in China rallied supporters there.

Most of the volunteers of Love Without Boundaries are parents or other relatives of adopted children — Ms. Maunu herself has two adopted daughters from China — and these personal relationships to the cause, coupled with the group’s established online network, may have been key to the group’s success.

Personal Cause

Stephen Hollister, a grants manager at St. Joseph’s Hospital, in Orange, Calif., entered the Parade challenge just 18 days before it wrapped up. He did so on behalf of the International Dravet Syndrome Epilepsy Action (IDEA) League, a small, volunteer-run group with fewer than 300 members worldwide.

At the end of the competition, the league had gathered 2,634 donations totaling $62,746 — winning a $50,000 prize from the Case Foundation.

Like Love Without Boundaries, the IDEA League came into the contest with a strong online presence and a close-knit, international network of members.

Mr. Hollister has a 7-year-old daughter, Serena, who suffers from the rare neurodevelopmental disorder, characterized by powerful seizures. He communicates with many other parents of children with Dravet syndrome through the group’s online forum, and rallied those friends to send personalized e-mail messages to their friends and family with stories, pictures of their children, and a request for a donation through America’s Giving Challenge.

Mr. Hollister said that parents of children with Dravet syndrome are very often short on time and money: Frequent seizures and developmental problems mean that their children need constant, vigilant supervision, and medicine and treatment are expensive.

“It’s a socially isolating disease,” he said.

The strong social network of the IDEA League’s Web forum is a boon to families dealing with Dravet syndrome, and those nationwide and international ties helped propel the organization to the front of the giving contest.

The competition demonstrated a cheap, effective way to raise money and publicity for the little-known cause, Mr. Hollister said. “There are so many desperate parents who want to help, and they just don’t know what to do.”

In addition to the e-mail messages, Mr. Hollister made scores of phone calls and posted updates on the forum about the contest’s progress.

“We reinforced one another, we inspired one another and encouraged one another. We kept reporting back on our success,” he said. “People are really excited, because now they’ve seen the power of this type of fund raising, so it’s given us hope.”