Reach for the Stars!
The result: $11 million to help Floridians recover from the devastation of an active hurricane season. Tracey has since accepted a position as the director of development for the nonprofit Foundation for Excellence in Education.
SPECIAL AWARDS
Best Blog — Donor Power Blog
Jeff Brooks, Merkle
The blogosphere is becoming one big, um, let’s say, cluster-write. Everyone is blogging. And the nonprofit sector is no exception. There are a lot of great blogs out there. There also are a lot of not-so-great ones. One blog that gets it right is the Donor Power Blog at www.donorpowerblog.com. It’s fresh, it’s funny, it’s frequent and, most importantly, its full of practical, actionable ideas for nonprofit fundraisers. We’re jealous … so Mr. Brooks must be doing something right.
Organization Contribution to the Sector — DonorsChoose.org
Not everyone thinks it’s a good idea for donors to have much control over where and how their philanthropic dollars are used. But — we hope — that old attitude is changing. Who can argue with the donor-happy impact of an organization like DonorsChoose.org? If you want to fund education projects, simply log on and choose the ones that interest you — anything from a $60 campaign to restock pencils to a $2,000 field trip effort.
DonorsChoose.org isn’t the first site of its kind — think Kiva.org and GlobalGiving.org — but it takes the process an important step further with its feedback element. Give $100 or more (or be the donor who provides the last chunk needed to finish funding on a project — no matter what the amount), and you get a personal thank-you package from the students who benefit from it. Not only that, but the DonorsChoose.org site is delightfully simple — everything you need to know about the organization is just a keystroke away from the homepage.
