Skip to main content

Five Years of Online Giving!

By Dana Rinderknecht, GivingFirst Manager, Community First Foundation

GivingFirst.org turns five today!

Five years ago, Community First Foundation brought this giving resource to nonprofits and donors in Metro Denver. Sixty nonprofits signed up and put their profiles on the site to show their transparency and accountability to donors. In the first year, an additional 113 nonprofits signed up and more than $680,000 was raised from more than 1,600 gifts.

Today there are 930 nonprofits participating from all over the state of Colorado and we have raised more than $1.2 million so far this year.

The GivingFirst team has been pulling data and looking at the trends to see what this all means. Of course we have the big numbers:

·       $30,086,272 dollars raised

·         57,336 donors

·         125,169 donations

·         1,028 participating nonprofits

But some of the numbers that stick out for me are:

·         50:  the number of states from which donations have come

·         23:  the number of countries from which we have received donations

·         62: the number of Colorado counties where donors live (out of 64 total)

·         53:  the number of donors who have given each of the five years

Let’s look at that last number: 53. There are 53 donors who have come back each of the five years and given to their favorite nonprofits; actually, 161 of their favorite nonprofits. They have given on average almost $5,000 for a grand total of $264,692 in 840 donations. It is exciting to me that they have been with us since the beginning and are still helping nonprofits today. So we are giving each of one of them a Giving eCard to thank them and to help them give a little bit more to their favorite nonprofit.

One of the things I hear from my friends and family is that they don’t think they can really help nonprofits: They think their gifts don’t make an impact. They aren’t the big philanthropists like Bill Gates or Warren Buffet.

I say to them that our data shows otherwise: It is the small gifts that when combined together make the biggest impact. We have had 73,134 donations made for under $100 and an additional 32,123 for under $250. That’s some serious impact.

We will be sharing more of our findings with everyone in the next month as we reflect back on the past five years and look forward to the next five. To the nonprofits, we say thank you for participating with us. To the donors, we say thank you for contributing to these amazing organizations doing fabulous work in our community.
Let’s Celebrate!
Labels:

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

Colorado Gives Day: Reflections from Nonprofits

By Angela Bevacqua, Communications Specialist Two months later and we’re still learning from Colorado Gives Day 2010. As we pour through data and listen to the experiences of our nonprofit friends and donors, we gain new insights about fundraising and philanthropy in Colorado. At a recent gathering of our Nonprofit Advisory Committee—a varied group of GivingFirst nonprofits that help us improve the program—we heard these reflections about The Day: Dan Hanley, director of development for Boulder County AIDS Project , said that 45% of their donations on Dec. 8 were from new donors. The agency raised more than $20,000 from 178 donations after a whirlwind of events. Dan said there are limitless ways in which you can promote your agency for Colorado Gives Day. They began soliciting support in the late-night hours of Dec. 7 at a bar in Denver, then moved on to the Denver Diner in the a.m., then several coffee shops in Boulder, and ended with a standing-room-only conc...
Post a Comment
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