Win $50,000 for Your Nonprofit with America's Giving Challenge

by Nathaniel Whittemore · 2009-10-08 12:02:00 UTC
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For the second year now, Parade Magazine, in partnership with Causes and the Case Foundation, are hosting America's Giving Challenge, a competition that rewards nonprofits for mobilizing their networks. The competition will run for one month, and already activity is exploding as projects pursue the prize.

The structure of the competition is designed to fully leverage the prize money to generate more resources for nonprofits. "Winning" means having the most number of unique donations, rather than generating the most resources. For example, a scrappy student led nonprofit that got 1,000 of their friends to donate $10 each would be doing better in this contest than a big nonprofit that got 5 $5,000 donations.

Each day, the organization that has the most number of unique donations for that day can win $1,000 (or $500 for second place). At the end of the month, the top three organizations in terms of generating resources we will win $50,000, $25,000 and $10,000 respectively.

This is one of my favorite contests of it's type. I think rewarding groups for mobilizing their resources creatively and effectively is a good use of crowds for good. I also think that the prize is a high enough amount that it justifies the time spent by smaller nonprofits to make it happen.

This year, as opposed to last year, there is some serious strategy happening. Last year, the winner of the competition was Atlas Corps, whose founder Scott Beale put together a list of hundreds of campaign "captains" (of which I was one) and "generals" who got at least 10 or 30 people to donate to the campaign. When it was all said and done, Atlas Corps not only won the $50,000 top prize, they had raised $33,000 in the meantime.

This year, Atlas Corps have put together a whole part of their site dedicated to the contest and have been actively recruiting new people to help this year. It's not just Atlas Corps that are already aggressively mobilizing. Young organizations like FACE AIDS are already on the leader board.

To learn more about the competition, check out Parade's website.

Nathaniel Whittemore is the founder of Assetmap. Previously he was the founding director of the Northwestern University Center for Global Engagement.
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