During the month of October, hundreds of bloggers, teachers, and twitterers devoted their time (and various methods of persuasion) to help inspire over $637,336 in donations to classroom projects via the DonorsChoose.org Blogger Challenge Social Media Challenge, reaching over 116,437 public school students in need of essential learning materials. 4,545 of their readers, fans, friends, and followers helped galvanize the challenge by supporting public schools across the country in such a significant way. We’ve shattered all previous year’s Blogger Challenges thanks to the hardwork of every participant, teacher and citizen philanthropist, along with a $250,000 match offer from HP (read more, here).
Winners: By raising $314,208, mobilizing 1,121 readers and reaching 51,905 students, Sarah Bunting and the Tomato Nation community were the overall winners of this competition. They even toppled the all-time record raised by one Giving Page set in last year’s challenge when they raised over $111,000. This is truly a testament to how deeply they care about public schools and how effective Sarah has been at inspiring the entire Tomato Nation community. We urge you to take a look at the blog posts, comments and video from the past month to see how they were able to mobilize so effectively. Her “Bet Red” Giving Page, an extension of her casino-royale “Bunting’s 13″ theme, also had the most donors; 25% to be exact. Kudos to TomatoNation.com. We look forward to seeing the Tomato costume make its way to Atlantic City where it will undoubtedly bet red!
The other big winner of the Social Media Challenge were our Teachers, who threw their hat into the ring under the “We Teach. Those Who Don’t, GIVE!” Leaderboard. Teachers from all over the country banded together, under this awesome slogan, and helped raise $110,131 for their classrooms. Perhaps most telling about their success is that almost half of the donors of the Social Media Challenge were inspired by one of these teachers. There were a total of 2,401 donors to just this leaderboard!
Other winners in each of the Social Media Challenge leaderboards, include:
By Dollars Raised:
- Fred Wilson:$37,957
- Livia Stone: $18,422
- Craig Newmark: $12,091
- Cosmic Variance: $11,525
- Geobloggers Gives Kids the Earth: $8,660
- Making a difference for Michigan Children: $7,994
By Donors Mobilized:
- Seed Media ScienceBlogs: This community of ScienceBlogs collectively mobilized 267 donors. Leading the pack? Dr. Isis’s Sacred Temple!
- Tech Blogs: Venture Capital/Tech Blogger, Fred Wilson (A VC), inspired 213 individuals to give to his campaign.
- Gawker: Gawker’s properties mobilized 84 donors, proving they could put their money where their mouth is
- Twitter: Twitter, though a first-time community, entered the fray and were led by Livia. She engaged 52 of her followers in the Social Media Challenge.
We also would like to recognize all of the Social Media Challenge participants and a few communities who joined us in the Challenge for the first time this year. They include: Ariba, Stack Overflow, Seattle 2.0, Mashable, Dr. Pal, Geobloggers, Christina’s LIS, Twitter, Biz Stone, Livia Stone, SocialBrite, The Intersection, 80beats, Gawker Media, Brooklyn Schools, The Nature Blog Network, SB Nation, Serious Eats, Nosh with Me, innonate, David Berkowitz, Kim Molodofsky, Yvonne Michelle, the Colorado Blogging Community, the Twitter 140 Conference, Performance Magazine, Greentech, and the entire BlogHer community!
Interested in creating your own Giving Page and starting your own mini ‘challenge?’ Check out this section of our website!
Finally, if you want to keep up with the participants, our sponsor HP, or with us on Twitter, please click on the respective links.
THANKS!
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