In the spirit of highlighting Great Give-Back Birthday’s we wanted to share a fun clip of Stephen Colbert waxing philosophical about how he’s planning to celebrate his upcoming Super Sweet 16 (May 13th).
Our Tech team recently unveiled ‘brand-spanking’ functionality geared at creating a better experience for users who are interested in creating a personalized DonorsChoose.org Giving Page. Setting up a Giving Page allows you to create a virtual registry of classroom projects that speak to your interests and then easily share them with your friends, family and supporters. Simply put, the Giving Page is a customizable wishlist that allows you to easily spread the ‘gift of giving.’ Setting one up is pretty simple, if you follow the steps below:
Step 1: If you don’t already have a DonorsChoose.org account Create an Account
Step 2: If you already have an account, or have just set-up an account, navigate to Create a Giving Page
Step 3: Once there, select the campaign that you’d like to be associated with
Step 4: Great, you’ve selected the campaign (here, The Great Give-Back Birthday), now you can customize the look and feel of your Giving Page. You can edit the title of your page, the message that appears at the top of your page and even upload an image to the page.
Step 5: After you’ve customized your page, you can add classroom projects that you’d like to see featured. You can elect to have your page automatically uploaded with projects by selecting one of the filter options, OR you can manually pick projects to appear on your giving page. Note: you can add or remove projects at any point during (and after) set up.
Step 6: Once projects have been added to your page, click ‘proceed.’ You are now ready to SHARE your wishlist with friends. There are five options:
Email: This feature auto populates a message that you can send to your friends. You can easily add email addresses from your address book.
Facebook: This feature allows you to share your giving page using “Connect with Facebook.” You can send a message to you Facebook friends or simply post your page to your wall.
Links: Your Giving Page has a unique permalink. Post this link to Twitter, add it to your Skype/Instant Messenger status, or simply share it with friends. Donations made using this link will automatically be credited to your page.
Widgets: Our team has created a suite of dynamic widgets that act as a miniature version of your Giving Page. Track your progress, your impact and your awesomeness using this widget. Upload it to your blog or website and get your entire network tracking your progress!
RSS: Add a feed of your Giving Page to your feed reader or website and watch your projects come to life.
Once your Giving Page is created, consider adding a message to your email signature to help promote your classroom wishlist (ex. Join my Give-Back Birthday Party at DonorsChoose.org)
Voila, you’ve created a Giving Page!
If you’re still having difficulties setting up your page or need help troubleshooting an issue, please send our Customer Service team a note and we’ll get back to you as soon as possible.
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With our Great Give-Back Birthday underway, our team has been doing a lot of IMPORTANT research around birthdays. We thought we’d share some of our ‘highly-classified’ findings:
More people celebrate their birthdays in August than in any other month (about 9% of all people). The two other months that rate high for birthdays are July and September.
Close to 2 billion Birthday Cards are sent each year in the U.S. alone, accounting for nearly 58 percent of all cards sent.
The world’s largest birthday cake was created in 2005 for Las Vegas’ centennial. 30,000 half-sheet cakes and nearly 40,000 pounds of frosting later, they had the World’s largest birthday cake!
A recent survey suggests that more people are born on October 5 in the United States than any other day. The least common birth date in the U.S. is May 22nd.
and… a bit of a strange one…
Since your last birthday 31,536,000 seconds have passed.
No matter how many seconds have passed since your last birthday, it’s never too early (or late) to sign up to be a part of the most inspiring online donation celebration, our Great Give-Back Birthday!
In case you were curious, here’s a picture of the infamous Las Vegas cake:
Everyone has their own way of observing a birthday. Here at DonorsChoose.org, we’ve established a unique tradition for celebrating our colleague’s birthdays filled with tons of fanfare (and a dash of self-deprecation). On the day of, Allyson trades in her Office Manager cap for a party hat and sends out a personalized “Happy Birthday” message to our entire staff. The messages are not only quirky, but occasionally revealing!
Here’s a small taste of how hilarious these emails can get:
It’s that Atlantic-City-Gambling, W-36th-St-Restaurant-Dwelling, Playing-Tennis-Against-Charles-and-Losing, Former-Corvette-Driving, Spreadsheet-Loving,Wharton-MBA-Earning, Stella-Drinking, Shakira-Karaoke-Singing, Soon-To-Be-With-Parents-Living, 1AM-Dashboard-Sending, Executive Vice President of Operations Cesar Bocanegra’s Birthday(Cheers! Excitement!Balloons!)
This spring, a handful of our colleagues (Abby, Alan, Frankie, Kris, Kirk) have opted for a new way to celebrate, by donating their birthdays to our Great Give-Back Birthday online celebration.
We hope that you’ll consider joining in on our party and donating your birthday, as well.
Check out the Great Give-Back Birthday flyer for more information. If you have additional questions or need help getting started, email birthday (at) donorschoose (dot) org.
On May 1st, we officially launch The Great Give-Back Birthday at DonorsChoose.org! We are inviting you to donate your birthday to support classroom projects at DonorsChoose.org, and then to invite all of your friends to the party.
It’s easy to join the online donation celebration. Here’s how it works:
You donate your birthday to DonorsChoose.org
You click here to create a personalized “Giving Page,” filled with classroom projects that you care about
You share your Giving Page with your friends and family. Your “party guests” can donate to the classroom projects you’ve selected!
We welcome birthday celebrants of all ages! We’ll showcase all of your birthdays on this page, and we’ll encourage our website visitors to look at your pages and give to your birthday too.
Check out The Great Give-Back Birthday flyer for more information, and visit this blog post for more detailed instructions. And if you have additional questions, contact us. As you think of ways to celebrate your upcoming birthday, why not do something different?
Driven by their commitment to socially responsible actions that have an effect on our local and global community, Green Mountain Coffee Roasters is sponsoring a challenge to individuals and organizations. The challenge is simple: propose one great idea to help address the environmental changes in our world. DonorsChoose.org has been given an opportunity to help teachers, who are bent on teaching conservation and empowering their students to understand the importance of going GREEN, to earn money for their classrooms. One click is all it takes to get the word out and vote.
How does it work? Navigate to the Just Means website, scroll down to the section “Empowering Individual Action” until you see the DonorsChoose.org logo. Click on our proposal and VOTE for our project. Voila, you’re done!
What happens if we win? Green Mountain Coffee Roasters will contribute a grant for $200,000 to “Green projects on Donorschoose.org” that incorporate environmental and conservation studies in the classroom. A few examples of projects like this already on our site include:
1.) A school looking to replace their school bus with one that runs purely on veggie oil
2.) A Chicago teacher who wants to teach her inner city students about the environment by incorporating a hands-on water quality experiment in the curriculum
3.) A South Carolina teacher who is requesting 5 recycling bins to start a recycling program at their school.
Winning this grant would allow DonorsChoose.org to play an integral part in bringing these projects to life and in helping students see the value in ‘going green.’ The polls close on March 21st so please vote today and please spread the word to your friends, families, social networks and co-workers.
Thanks so much for helping students go green! If we do win, we will announce it on this page! Please feel free to contact us with questions daphra (at) donorschoose (dot) org.
Feel free to leave comments on our project proposal page!
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Tim Ferriss, acclaimed author of The 4-Hour Work Week (#1 New York Times bestseller) and winner of the 2007 DonorsChoose.org Blogger Challenge, plans to launch a campaign to attract Twitter followers, while benefiting DonorsChoose.org in the process. Tim has just announced his plans to donate $3 to DonorsChoose.org for every new person who follows him on Twitter (aka his “Tweet to Beat”). The goal is to directly help 25,000 U.S. public school students in low-income and high-need classrooms in two weeks.
This so-called “Tweet to Beat” is a follow-up philanthropic experiment to his successful LitLiberation, a campaign by bloggers and their readers, and CEOs and their employees, to spread the power of literacy worldwide.
If the spirit of doing good doesn’t move you, then Tim’s promises of a round-trip ticket anywhere in the world or a brand new 15″ MacBook Pro might do the trick.
For more information about Tim Ferriss’ “Tweet to Beat” DonorsChoose.org Challenge, please check out his blog, RT his announcement, and don’t forget to follow him Twitter.
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Stephen Colbert, a long time supporter of DonorsChoose.org and host of The Colbert Report, has announced that he will join our Board of Directors.
You may recall that Colbert first partnered with DonorsChoose.org last year, after announcing his entrance into the South Carolina Presidential Primary. Teaming up with DonorsChoose.org, his viewers were encouraged to support the organization in lieu of actual donations to his candidacy. Termed “VotersChoose,” DonorsChoose.org received over $68,000 in donations for “Colbert For President.” The response was so impressive that several months later, he invited supporters of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton to do the same. As a lead-up to the Pennsylvania primary, he created a “philanthropic straw poll that makes a difference,” where individuals could donate to Pennsylvania classroom projects in honor of their favorite candidate. This time, his supporters inspired over $185,000 in donations. Adding further awareness to the needs of Pennsylvania classrooms via DonorsChoose.org, Colbert even featured student artwork on his show, The Colbert Report.
Asked recently about his decision to join the DonorsChoose.org Board, he noted, “DonorsChoose.org allows anyone who wants to help children learn to make a donation directly to a specific classroom; As I endeavor to protect our nation from bears, DonorsChoose.org is protecting public school kids from classrooms that lack books, art supplies, technology, and field trips. I’m honored to join the DonorsChoose.org Board of Directors – there aren’t any bears on it, right?”
During the month of October, over 150 bloggers devoted their time (and various methods of persuasion) to help inspire their readers to give over $270,000 in classroom projects via the DonorsChoose.org Blogger Challenge, reaching over 65,000 public school students in need of essential learning materials.
Winners: By raising $111,352, mobilizing 1,162 readers and reaching 19,577 students, Sarah Bunting and readers of her Tomato Nation blog won recognition from both Yahoo! and Six Apart. This truly is a testament to how deeply her readers care about public schools and how effective Sarah has been at inspiring the Tomato Nation community. The Daily Beast recently ran a story on Tomato Nation’s participation in the Blogger Challenge.
Other winners in each of the Blogger Challenge leaderboards, include:
Music Blogs: Minneapolis-based Music Blog, Culture Bully, mobilized 18 donors
… and two major shout outs to the Black Bloggers for Education and Sports Blogs who joined this effort late in the game and still managed to not only inspire their readers, but also encourage fellow bloggers to get involved (thank you!).
Black Bloggers for Education: Kevin’s A Slant Truth blog, which focused its campaign on literacy, mobilized 4 donors
Sports Blogs: Free Darko, an existential basketball covering unusual aspects of sports, mobilized 7 donors
Jerry Yang, CEO of Yahoo!, has just announced that he will offer a grand prize of lunch with the blogger who inspires the most readers to donate to the 2008 DonorsChoose.org Blogger Challenge.
For details on Jerry Yang’s announcement and Yahoo’s involvement in this year’s Blogger Challenge, check out the Yahoo! Blog.
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