March 3, 2009 | Read Time: 2 minutes
Using a Web 2.0 brand of humor –- along with e-mail, video, and outreach to social networks — the Nonprofit Technology Network raised more than $10,000 for scholarships to its annual technology conference in San Francisco.
“You guys answer each other’s questions, give each other encouragement, point each other in the right direction all the time,” Holly Ross, NTEN’s executive director, says in a video appeal. “Basically through NTEN, you support each other, and these days we all need a lot of support.”
Ms. Ross, who has been with the technology organization for more than six years, gave donors an added incentive to give.
In the video, she laid out three potentially embarrassing activities –- recreating the dance sequence from a Beyoncé video, eating a sandwich called the Bacon Explosion, or playing her college marching band trombone in San Francisco’s Union Square –- and said donors could vote for which she had to do if the organization met its goal.
“It would be easy if it were bacon –- even though it sounds like a horrible fate in many ways,” Ms. Ross says of her still-to-be-decided activity. “But all signs point to Beyoncé.”
The online contributions — together with $10,000 donated by Convio, an Austin, Tex., company that provides software for nonprofit organizations — will pay for free conference registrations for 57 people who work at nonprofit groups with budgets of less than $1-million.
Registration for the April conference in San Francisco has been stronger than the group expected, given the state of the economy. So far more than 1,000 people have signed up, and Ms. Ross says that registration is on pace to exceed the target of 1,200 attendees that NTEN set when it budgeted for the meeting last spring.
NTEN plans to write a case study documenting the steps it took to raise the scholarship money.
“It was a lot of work,” says Ms. Ross. “I think the title of the report will be something like, ‘The Hardest $10,000 I Ever Raised.’”
