Charity Drives Gifts by Showing Donors Where Their Money Will Go

The Chronicle is highlighting a number of organizations that have come up with innovative approaches to year-end fundraising. Here’s one of them:

The nonprofit Read Global is hoping to raise thousands of dollars with its “Empower” campaign, which shows donors where their gifts will go whether they’re helping one person, one family, or many people at a time.

The literacy and economic-development charity sends appeals that feature a woman, a family, and a village in the developing world. Donors are then invited to “choose your impact” by selecting whom they want to help.

For instance, to help one woman, it takes $50 to pay for a year of leadership training, $100 to teach her how to read, or $250 to buy educational materials on women’s rights.

In the family category, $500 would provide job training to parents, and $1,000 would enroll 40 parents in a health workshop so they can take better care of their families.

A $2,500 donation for one village would stock bookshelves in a Read Global library, and $5,000 would finance educational training programs for a year for anybody who needs them.

In addition, Read Global is using a year-end direct-mail letter to alert its supporters to a $50,000 matching gift for their donations. It’s also sending supporters a series of four emails this month with a video about the campaign included in the first message. In addition, people who make a gift or tell their social-network followers about the campaign receive a thank-you video.

So far, Read Global has raised $19,100 of the campaign’s $50,000 goal. The charity usually gets most of the donations for its year-end drives in the last week of the year, so its officials are confident about hitting the goal.

But things could move even faster now: The campaign has gotten a boost from UpWorthy, a site that aggregates viral content and boasts a viewership of 5 million, which pointed users to the video.