drews, and the homes have already been assigned to other
families.
“If you are doing a small
project like an orphanage or a
school, yes, the church community and those kind of entities
can deed land,” he says. “But
large-scale housing is a politically loaded issue, and every
politician who has a stake in
the land will be involved, and
it’s just extremely complicated.”
Now Habitat, which received
$36.4-million for Haiti recovery, is out of money. Unless the
group gets more donations, it
may be able to construct only
another 100 permanent homes.
Creativity and Technology Will Drive Many 2012 Appeals
us,” says James Wynn, assistant
vice president for development.
And “we made that viral.”
He says the organization will
continue with the “Five Weeks
of Giving” later this year but
will start promoting it at least a
month earlier, in October.
Making cutting-edge technology a focus of fundraising
Continued from Page 15
night, the event raised more
than $6.1-million, a half-mil-lion more than the same event
raised in 2010.
The center says it’s considering using those same technologies again for this December’s
gala, especially the electronic-bidding system.
able to send, the number of online gifts to the trust grew by
more than 25 percent, with an
average gift of $140, up from
about $108 in 2010.
“The donors like our message,” says Margie Kim Bermeo,
chief philanthropy officer. “They
feel strongly about the mission.
We had a lot of donors that were
lapsed, and we were able to reengage them.”
Donated Land
Food for the Poor, which, like
Habitat, operated in Haiti for
decades before the quake, also
quickly depleted the $20.7-mil-
lion it raised for the recovery.
That’s particularly discouraging because Food for the Poor
has built 2,681 homes since the
quake, says Angel Aloma, the
charity’s executive director. He
says that rich landowners, the
church, or city mayors typically
donate the land because they’re
familiar with the group’s 25
years of work in Haiti.
Since October 2010, Food for
the Poor has drawn on its general funds to help Haiti rebuild.
“We have the infrastructure
and capacity to build,” Mr. Alo-
ma says. “It’s frustrating not to
be able to do more.”
The Unitarian Universalist
Service Committee, which re-
ceived $2.6-million after the di-
saster, has also had some suc-
cess in securing land.
Mouvement Paysan Papaye,
which represents Haitian peasants, donated 20 acres in a town
called Kolade, less than three
hours from Port-au-Prince. So
far, 10 homes have been constructed with the Unitarian
group’s money. An irrigation
system is being built, and the
Haitians have received training
in agriculture. Ms. Flick, of the
Unitarian Universalist committee, says she is optimistic.
The European Union recently paved a road to a nearby village; this year, it plans to construct a road to Kolade—which,
Ms. Flick says, will make it
easier for villagers to transport their fruit to market. “It’s
a small example, but if it could
be replicated all over Haiti, the
country could not only be feeding itself but be exporting food,”
she says.
And yet, repeating such suc-cesses seems frustratingly unlikely. Much of the land in the
area supported by the Unitarian group is owned by the
government and the Catholic
Church. Ms. Flick says she isn’t
sure why more of the land isn’t
being made available for ordinary Haitians.
“The land is fertile,” she says.
“But it’s just sitting there.”
“It’s not a good
feeling to be behind.
December is usually
a make-it-or-break-it
month.”
helped the Fred Hutchinson
Cancer Research Center, in Seattle, spiff up its 36th annual
Hutch Holiday black-tie gala in
December. Guests checked in by
using an interactive tablet and
then bid on items at an auction
using similar devices. And when
it was time for dinner, they were
seated in a room enveloped by a
244-foot-wide video screen that
showed images of the center’s
research labs. By the end of the
Getting E-Mail Addresses
The Trust for Public Land
points to its efforts to reach out
to past donors and to connect
with new ones for the 18-per-
cent gain in year-end gifts.
One big help: a creative approach to getting e-mail addresses from potential supporters. It featured an interactive quiz on its Web site called
“What’s Your Park Personality?” before the year-end fund-raising season started. To find
out if they were a “green thumb”
or an “urban adventurer,” 2,000
people completed the multiple-choice quiz, which required that
they provide their e-mail addresses. Those people were then
added to the group’s database of
potential donors.
As a result of the increased
number of e-mail appeals it was
Good Publicity
Perhaps the groups that are
struggling the most to meet
growing demand are those that
focus on social services.
The Oregon Food Bank says
year-end gifts increased 6 percent over last year’s holiday giving season, but it still sees a
disturbing trend: Its most loyal
donors are giving smaller sums
because of the hard times, so
last year’s increase stems mostly from new or wealthy donors.
Laura Golino de Lovato, the
charity’s director of development, says the group hopes to
keep the food bank’s needs in
supporters’ minds via social media and other technologies.
Another social-service group,
the Men’s Shelter of Char-
lotte, says year-end donations
dropped about 2 percent.
Peter Bolton and Marisa
López-Rivera contributed to this
article.
Interactive Donation Games Appeal to Young Supporters
nation experience compelling
and bring our mission to life?”
says Cristine Gasiorowski, a
spokeswoman for the group.
The number of donations her
group received grew 18 percent
during the holiday season over
the same period in 2010. By
December 31, it had raised all
$550,000 of its goal using the
gingerbread-house builder.
Currently, the charity is reviewing whether to continue the
holiday campaign in 2012 but is
hoping to include gaming elements in its other fundraising
efforts this year.
Mercy Corps, the global relief
nonprofit in Portland, Ore., presented holiday shoppers with
its Gift-o-Matic Facebook application.
Visitors could get suggestions
on what to buy friends and rel-
atives based on ideas from the
charity’s online alternative-gift
catalog. Donors could pick from
a list of possible answers to the
statement: “I am looking for a
gift for ____ who is passionate
about ___.”
Suggested gifts for “Dad”
who is interested in the “envi-
ronment” included a vegetable
garden for $40 and an irriga-
tion canal for $250. The “gifts”
were sent as donations to Mercy
Corps in the friend’s or relative’s
name.
“Saying ‘donate’ over and over
again isn’t effective, especially
on Facebook and Twitter,” says
Megan Zabel Holmes, the charity’s online marketing officer. “In
order to stand out from all the
noise, we had to be a little bit
creative.”
Continued from Page 11
The Gift-o-Matic app has generated more than 10,000 page
views since it was started mid-November, helping Mercy Corps
realize a 15-percent jump in online contributions during the
2011 holiday season over the
previous year’s.
Dancing Bears
The Marine Toys for Tots
Foundation worked with eBay
to create a holiday-giving experience both real and virtual
through the Give-a-Toy Store.
The two organizations set
up two temporary shops—one
in New York, the other in San
Francisco—with store displays
featuring huge screens filled
with teddy bears, trains, and
other toys.
Next to each toy was a dollar
amount and a QR, or quick-re-sponse, code; passersby could
point their smartphones at the
code and, through a phone app,
go directly to a Web site where
they could donate. Once they
paid that amount, they could
immediately see the toy come
alive: a teddy bear might dance
and cheer, or a train might run
along its tracks.
The creative approach contributed to a successful year
that saw Toys for Tots cross the
$2-million mark in online donations, which increased by 20
percent in 2011. (The charity-says it’s unclear if eBay will be
doing the store displays again
in 2012.)
“That’s the kind of business
we’re trying to cultivate here,”
says William Grein, vice presi-
dent for marketing and develop-
ment. “We’re trying to appeal to
the younger set, who does more
of the online giving.”
Other groups didn’t rely so
much on holiday themes.
Noelle Barton and Peter
Bolton contributed to this article.
Picturing Donors
Sometimes charities appeal
to donors’ vanity as part of their
interactive, game-like bids. In
one case, an organization used
that motivating force to prod
online visitors to recruit their
friends as supporters.
Charity: Water has started a
project called Water Forward,
a virtual book that shows pictures of its donors in a grid-like
gallery.
Supporters “pay it forward”
by giving $10 to get their Facebook profile picture or that of
a friend in the Water Forward
book. Every additional $10 allows them to include more of
their friends’ pictures. The organization, which builds wells
to provide clean water for people worldwide, is using Facebook to alert people when someone makes a donation on their
behalf.
Since November, the effort
has raised $265,000. “It’s a new
opportunity to target different
donors that weren’t involved before,” says Sarah Cohen, Charity: Water’s communication and
development manager. “It’s an
experiment in giving.”
