Skip to main content

What a Difference a Day Makes!

By Marla J. Williams, president and CEO of Community First Foundation

Community First Foundation, FirstBank, media sponsors, and hundreds of nonprofits work all year to pull off a giving day that makes a difference.

In the months leading up to Colorado Gives Day, we’ve been awed by the current of energy building in Colorado. In the last few weeks, who could go a day—an hour--without hearing something about December 6?

A year ago, when we launched the concept, we wanted to enhance giving in Colorado. What we got—what we all got—was so much more than that: community engagement and spirit; nonprofit collaboration; people wanting to be a part of something bigger; and a unified, singular drive to help each other by giving.

And the donors were unstoppable.  Despite some website glitches, donors were determined to make their gifts – lots of gifts!  More than 52,000 donations flooded GivingFirst.org to the tune of $12 million. That’s an increase of 150 percent over last year’s 20,000 donations.

Thank you to FirstBank for being the corporate partner of every nonprofit’s dream, contributing $500,000 and media buys to the cause.

Thank you to our fabulous  media sponsors who  raised the public’s awareness of Colorado Gives Day on a grand scale.

Thank you to our Bonus Bucks sponsors who inspired donors and added excitement to the day.

Thank you to the foundations who support nonprofits in extraordinary ways every day, funded the event’s webinars, and were also there to make sure Colorado Gives Day 2011 remained free of processing fees.

And, of course, thank you to the boards and staffs of nearly 1,000 nonprofits who dedicated their energy and creative ideas to make sure Colorado Gives Day was a stunning success.

Thank you Colorado! What a difference a day can make.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Blog 1: Tips on How to Read Form 990

By Angela Bevacqua, Senior Communications Specialist Have you ever been advised to look at a nonprofit’s Form 990 before making a donation? Then you look at it and wonder how to make sense of it all? If you aren’t an accountant or nonprofit administrator, you may avoid the daunting task. On our online giving website ColoradoGives.org, we require nonprofits to provide several documents, including the Form 990 as appropriate, to encourage transparency about their programs and finances. We don’t evaluate nonprofits on the website; we require nonprofits to share information to help donors make informed decisions about giving. I asked Community First Foundation’s finance department to help us interpret this useful document. We will do this in two blogs: Blog 1 shares the basics of Form 990 and Blog 2 delves deeper.  Q: What exactly is the Form 990? Form 990, called the Return of Organizations Exempt From Income Tax, must be filed with the IRS each year by charitable organiza...
1 comment
Read more

Your SOS Certificate of Registration and Sour Milk

It happens; we have all done it: forgotten milk in the fridge that goes bad, expires. If you had milk that was expiring on 6.15.2014, would you continue to drink it on 8.20.2014? You could but it would probably be pretty gross; thus no longer serving its original purpose of being healthy and delicious. As a person who always found the concept of the “renew by” date on the Secretary of State (SOS) Certificate of Registration  for charities and fundraisers a little confusing, it helps me to compare it to this concept of milk expiring. Think of the “ renew by ” date on your Certificate of Registration as an expiration date . If you had milk that expired on 6.15.2014, you would make sure that you bought more milk with an expiration date later than that. Your organization’s SOS Certificate of Registration is pretty similar. If your “renew by” date expired on 6.15.2014, as long as you file an extension with the Secretary of State’s office before then and the “renew by” date on...
2 comments
Read more

Meeting Space Celebrity Sighting: Natalie Portman

Valerie Brown, Meeting Space Administrator I met Natalie Portman in the Community First Foundation Meeting Space yesterday. Natalie Portman (L) and Valerie Brown in the Foundation's free Meeting Space Okay, not the Natalie Portman of Star Wars , V for Vendetta and Black Swan . This Natalie Portman is a top-notch meeting facilitator who was working with a group advancing Mental Health First Aid in Jefferson County. Led by Jefferson Center for Mental Health, the group met in our largest meeting room to discuss training community members on how to identify persons who may benefit from mental health resources. Jefferson Center for Mental Health is one of the dizzying array of nonprofits to have come through our doors since we opened the Meeting Space a year ago! February 2016 saw one meeting lasting four hours with six people. February 2017 saw 37 meetings for a total of 250 hours with 799 people through the door! In fact, in the first year we have hosted 269 mee...
2 comments
Read more