Events

Bo Jackson will be hosting the 3rd Annual Celebrity Charity Golf Classic Friday, June 24, at Old Oaks Country Club in Homer Glen, Ill. The event will benefit the Give Me A Chance Foundation, dedicated to guiding disadvantaged youth toward personal and professional growth.

All proceeds will go toward the development and support of the many athletic/educational programs offered by the foundation.

More than 150 cities across the world participated in Twestival this year. Each city selected a local charity and received a Web page from FirstGiving.

'Twestival' brings the Twittersphere offline and onto a physical location — a fairground, skating rink, park — for a single day to highlight a community cause. This year, it was March 24, with donations accepted through March 31 on the website. As of March 31, they had raised more than $550K for more than 150 local nonprofit causes.

Alex Levin had arrived two days early in Las Vegas for a conference that the Jewish Federations of North America called Tribe­Fest, a social and cultural gathering of Jews ages 22 to 45.

The federations are gambling that his revelry will eventually translate into serious donations from younger Jews and build stronger relationships with donors like Mr. Levin.

There are four major online communications tools that every fundraiser should take advantage of — event marketing, social-media marketing, e-mail marketing and online surveys — according to Erik Mintz, director of event marketing at nonprofit software provider Constant Contact.

When Welcome Home 2011 commemorates the 25th anniversary of the 1986 Vietnam Veterans Welcome Home Parade in Chicago, event planners can count on a new leading-edge online platform to help sell tickets, raising funds and awareness for one of the Windy City’s most anticipated events. The platform, www.tix4cause.com™, founded by Chicago businessman Kevin Nemetz, was designed specifically to help nonprofits. Its application is ideal for “Welcome Home 2011” which takes place in downtown Chicago, June 17th-19th.

Twenty of the top 30 fundraising races, walks and other endurance events increased donations last year, a big change from 2009 when 20 such events lost money, according to the Run Walk Ride Fundraising Council’s fifth annual study.

Overall, the 30 fundraising events produced $1.65-billion in revenue in 2010. That was an increase of 1.6 percent, or $25.9-million, from the year before.

The online tools you use help make your event fundraisers’ jobs easier, but most volunteer fundraisers need your help and coaching. Don’t depend on the technology tools to do all the work.

It’s March, and for tens of thousands of people, that means it’s time to go bald for St. Baldrick’s Foundation. People who shave their heads have helped raise $100-million to finance research on children’s cancer since 2000. So far this year, St. Baldrick’s has already raised more than $10-million. More than 27,900 people have registered to shave their heads in 2011 at more than 800 events across the country, with about 600 of them taking place this month.

Lincolnway Special Recreation Association has applied for a $2.5 million grant from the state to build the new facility and finds out in April or May if it was approved. If so, it's possible the organization could be moved in by fall 2012. But that depends on funding. Or fundraising, such as this past weekend's dance marathon put on by the Trailblazer Charitable Foundation.

With more than 70 attendees, the Trailblazer Dance Marathon raised more than $1,200 for Lincolnway Special Recreation Association's new building.

Beer and ping pong and Xbox Kinect — you don’t need a heck of a lot more to make for an epic Saturday. But those factors all combined to pit media giants including The New York Times, Gawker.TV, Aol Thrillist, and Foursquare in a tournament to support charity.

The tournament, BackSpin 2011, was a way to bring together the NY tech community and raise money for Child’s Play, a non-profit that provides books, games and consoles to hospitals across North America.