Doctors Without Borders

Reddit announced it would donate $82,765.95 to the Electric Frontier Foundation (EFF), a group that defends civil liberties in the digital world. Together with technologists, activists and attorneys, EFF works to defend free speech online and fight illegal surveillance, in addition to its other advocacy work. Reddit is donating 10 percent of its 2014 revenue to a number of noteworthy organizations whose missions fall in line with that of the Reddit community. It named its recipients after 80,000 users cast their votes for U.S.-based nonprofits they deemed worthy of getting the funds.

(Press release, Jan. 22, 2015) — Schwab Charitable™, one of the largest national donor-advised funds, reported $928 million in grants to charities on behalf of its donors in 2014, a 25 percent increase over 2013. Gifts went to more than 48,000 charitable organizations. Support increased substantially across all categories with the highest number of individual grants going to health and human services, religious causes, and education. Among the most widely supported charities in 2014 were Doctors Without Borders, Wounded Warrior Project, The Salvation Army, and local public radio and television stations.

The charity event Awesome Games Done Quick, a weeklong gaming livestream featured on the video-streaming site Twitch, raised more than $1.5 million for charity research earlier this month, benefiting the Prevent Cancer Foundation. How it did it says a lot about the value of embracing niche audiences online.

The weeklong gaming marathon was hosted at a physical location, but the momentum and energy behind the event was really online, where people could watch speedrunners play live, chat about it, donate money and potentially win some prizes.

Freemiums and premiums have long been staples of direct-mail fundraising. In this video, Direct Marketing IQ's Paul Bobnak takes a look at this practice with a little twist. He reviews the tried-and-true method of address labels included in a Paralyzed Veterans of America mailing and then lays out how both the Sierra Club and Doctors Without Borders utilize maps as engaging freemiums for donors.

Google announced that it will match monetary donations that its users make to fight Ebola through a new fundraising campaign website the tech giant launched Monday. This is the first matching campaign the company has ever announced.

The campaign will benefit four organizations — Doctors Without Borders, Partners in Health, Save the Children and the International Rescue Committee — by way of a donation to the Network for Good, an online fundraising platform.

Reviewing the winners across all channels for the 2014 DMAW MAXI Awards, the shared themes were engagement, extraordinary storytelling and relationship building. The stats and snapshot images of the winning Direct Mail, Digital Media, Multichannel and Telemarketing campaigns provided high-level intel of the strategies and tactics.

As FundRaising Success gears up for the ninth annual Gold Awards for Fundraising Excellence, take a look back at the 2006 winners, headlined by the Package of the Year winner from Food for the Hungry.

Here is a mobile and social fundraising success checklist excerpted from "Mobile for Good: A How-To Fundraising Guide for Nonprofits" by Heather Mansfield, founder and principal blogger at Nonprofit Tech for Good. By reading the book and implementing the steps necessary to launch a comprehensive mobile and social fundraixsing plan — and checking off the must-do items as you go along — your nonprofit will have in place mobile and social fundraising plan flexible enough to adjust to rapid changes in fundraising and communication technology that will occur over the next decade.

When we asked two-time bobsleigh Olympian and silver medalist Helen Upperton to fundraise for MSF Canada, we offered her the support and guidance of our fundraising and communications teams. Well, Helen is a veteran fundraiser. A master, as are most amateur athletes in this country. They have to be. Today, she’s retired from bobsleigh and broadcasting from Sochi. How did she achieve all she’s achieved in the last decade? Training, talent and donors — and knowing how to ask. She’s so good at asking I started writing down some of our conversations.

What we write is designed to generate strong emotions. And it’s why we have to be certain that what we write takes readers into the world we want them to be in.