Last October, the 2007 Blogger Challenge inspired the web community to help 75,000 kids in high-need public schools. This October, bloggers and their readers are setting out to provide even more help to students in low-income communities. Technorati is sponsoring the “generosity rankings,” and FORTUNE is helping to spread the good word. Yahoo!, who will award the blog that mobilizes the most readers, recently announced that they will pay for a field trip for the kids at a school of the winning bloggers choice (up to $5,000). Six Apart will also award the bloggers who helps the most students (TBA)!
Titans of the Web have tossed their hats into the ring. TechCrunch, Engadget, BoingBoing, Fred Wilson, Kara Swisher, Apartment Therapy, and other top bloggers have created giving pages on DonorsChoose.org listing their favorite classroom project requests–and are now encouraging their readers to donate to those projects. See the giving contest take shape at: www.donorschoose.org/bloggers and check out a great piece in FORTUNE describing the 2008 Blogger Challenge.
Fear not, small bloggers. The DonorsChoose.org Blogger Challenge is about the engagement and generosity of your readers, not the number of your readers. Here are some tips for having the most fun, and helping the most students possible, during the 2008 Blogger Challenge:
1. Invite your readers to pick some of the classroom projects that will go on your giving page. When readers participate in choosing the projects, they feel a special responsibility to fund those projects.
2. Offer to do something wacky if your readers reach a certain level of donations. Last year, the blogger behind TomatoNation.com offered to dance through Rockefeller Center dressed as a tomato if her readers funded all the projects on her challenge page. It worked.
3. Say something feisty about the other bloggers in your giving group or about the singular awesomeness of your readers. A sense of competition, and of team pride, really helps to inspire donations.
4. Use the widget for your giving page. This widget will not only serve as a constant call-to-action for your readers, but as a public salute to the individual readers who have made donations through your giving page.
Here are some all-star posts from the last Blogger Challenge:
TomatoNation: “Preview” and “Whoa”
ScienceBlogs.com | Pharyngula: “Freethinkers for Education”
TechCrunch: “Fred Wilson Needs to be Stopped!”
Kara Swisher (All Things Digital): “Blogger Charity Smackdown” and “Using MY kids to Raise Money for the Kids at DonorsChoose.org
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