November 16 is Give to the Max Day.
GiveMN launched Give to the Max day in 2009 as an annual day for Minnesota nonprofits to come together in a unified online fundraising campaign. The response from donors and nonprofits were mixed. Established nonprofits with sophisticated online giving mechanisms and traditional (read “older”) donors generally were not early adapters to the GiveMN agenda. It seemed the more attached to direct mail and gala event giving traditions a donor or nonprofit was the more they dismissed GiveMN’s efforts to bring all Minnesota nonprofits to the online fundraising game. There were actual bugs in the early efforts—confusion on matching, complaints from nonprofits that the one-day online giving interfered with and cannibalized relationship based years long donor cultivation.
The reality is that in our Steve Jobs tech obsessed world easy online giving is here to stay.
GiveMN has created a portal for Minnesotans to make online donations and this year they are taking it up a notch. Incentives to encourage nonprofit and donor participation include a new leader board structure with three tiers of prize grants includes: “Golden Ticket” $1,000 prize grants given randomly every hour and one $10,000 “Grand Golden Ticket” prize randomly given at 11:59 p.m.
The GiveMN partnership with TheUpTake.org brings the online giving event live and in person to the Mall of America were live stream online broadcast of interviews with nonprofits, live entertainment and hourly updates will be shared. Select nonprofits will be staffing information tables in the rotunda to answer questions about their respective nonprofit’s work in Minnesota.
MOA shoppers will be able to make donations at a “Giving Station” to receive an “I Gave” sticker good for mall store and restaurant discounts. Look for the Collage Mascot Competition at 5:00pm and listen for live stream coverage of the evening program featuring Tim Mahoney at 6:00pm.
Give to the Max Day has been such positive thing for our organization and for the sector as a whole. Our staff and constituents are so excited to be a part of something bigger and it’s all centered on giving!
Thanks for sharing on Give to the Max Day – I hope folks will support their favorite nonprofits on a day with all these extra incentives!
This Give to the Max Day should be the best one yet – with a wide variety of prize grants and great awareness building for nonprofits through the Mall of America event.
Yes! Thanks for helping to spread the word about Give to the Max Day.
I’m proud that we’ve got an organization like GiveMN in our community that’s led the two largest online fundraising events in the world – Give to the Max Day 2010 and 2011 – and established a nationally recognized model for helping nonprofits fundraise more actively online.
Thanks for helping promote Give to the Max Day–it’s a very important and exciting day for Minnesota nonprofits!
Lindsi Gish
Associate Director of Communications & Media Relations
Second Harvest Heartland