#GivingTuesday gets boost with virtual giving tower

Featured on usatoday.com

A movement designed to be the charitable answer to Black Friday and Cyber Monday will have a powerful new tool this year for visualizing giving.

The fundraising platform website Crowdrise is offering an app that allows people to see the amount of giving. The app creates a virtual giving tower when a smartphone is pointed at a dollar. It also will create the tower on a bigger scale inside the app for users who point it at the National Mall and Worldwide Plaza in New York City.

The free app is available in the Google Play Store and iTunes.

The tower is designed to put a visual perspective on #GivingTuesday. Each brick will represent a donation and will feature a photo of the donor and the recipient. The tower will grow as donations come in.

"Giving Tuesday has always been about getting people together so they can see themselves as part of a larger movement but we are trying to marry that up with some of the leverage that can be generated by personal networks, by organizational networks, by creative use of fun and prizes and incentives to kind of turbocharge that impulse," said actor Edward Norton, co-founder of Crowdrise.

Co-founder Robert Wolfe said the giving tower is like a thermometer for measuring donations.

"We wanted to do something fun, at Crowdrise our whole goal is to make this fun and interesting and notable, and also really try to figure out a way to take this movement, which lives all over the Internet, and find a place where everyone can sort of rally together," he said.

#GivingTuesday started in 2012 as a charitable answer to the retail shopping days of Black Friday, Small Business Saturday and Cyber Monday with help from big names such as Sony and Microsoft.

An exact amount raised is not known. But the movement is causing an increase in donations, organizers say.

Charleston, S.C.-based Blackbaud, which offers software and services for non-profits reported a 90% increase in online giving for its customers last year, according to statistics provided by #GivingTuesday spokeswoman Cindy Tanenbaum.

PayPal saw a nearly 100% increase in U.S. donations and an 858% increase in mobile donations over 2012.

Beyond the Crowdrise giving tower, plenty of groups are getting involved this year. Here's a look:

• Microsoft will match donations made throughYouthSpark on GlobalGiving, a micro-giving site that enables donors to support the creation of education, employment and entrepreneurship opportunities for youth.

• Donors Forum wants to raise $12 million from 100,000 people in Illinois with the #IlGiveBig campaign. They'll be providing social sector organizations with tools, technical assistance, and support to hone their strategies for #GivingTuesday.

• The United Methodist General Board of Global Ministries will match up to $1 million in gifts made online to any project through The Advance as part of UMC #GivingTuesday.

• PayPal will offer a 1% donation match on all gifts made in December through their special holiday giving microsite. The company will promote this to millions of PayPal users in the U.S. throughout December. It also is extending the match to donations through Razoo.

• The Salvation Army is integrating #GivingTuesday into its annual kettle appeal with a#redkettlereason campaign. It will ask people to reflect about why they are giving and to share their giving story on social media.

• Walmart Foundation plans to give away $1.5 million in grants to about 75 food pantries. Each pantry would receive $20,000 to buy new equipment and renovate the facilities.

Click here to read the full article.