Africa

Free Webinar: Raise $1,000 a day for 30 days

Nonprofit organizations are seeking fresh ideas that will help lead to more donations and volunteer engagement.  FirstGiving presents a FREE Webinar about online social fundraising while showing how one nonprofit raised $1,000 a day for 30 days online. You can easily design a similar fundraising program for your supporters as well.  Join the Webinar to learn how. [...]

Sunday is World Water Day

Last summer I spent several days with a Ugandan family in a suburb outside Kampala, Uganda’s capital.  When this family needs water for washing, cooking, and drinking, the daughters walk about a quarter of a mile to go get it.  After a few hours of insisting that i wanted to go with them to collect [...]

Climb up so Kids Can Grow Up Champions the Virtual Event

Climb Up So Kids Can Grow Up

What is a virtual event, you ask?  Well, we’ll tell you.  A virtual event is one that doesn’t require its participants to be in the same place at the same time in order to participate.  It can take place anywhere in the country (or the world), in any time zone.  It could be a hike, [...]

(PRODUCT) RED Makeover: the best way to support the AIDS cause?

We kicked this month off with a post about World AIDS Day, and as AIDS Awareness Month continues, discussions about the disease and people affected by it are popping up all over the blogosphere.  Last week I ran across a video highlighting a (PRODUCT) RED “makeover” as part of the anti-AIDS campaign.  You may have [...]

Boston AIDS Africa Caregiver Kit Event

In Boston this weekend?  Passionate about ending the AIDS pandemic in Africa?  Boston AIDS Africa, a local association of Boston businesswomen, has teamed up with World Vision to assemble 3,000 Caregiver Kits tomorrow at the Back Bay Events Center.  These kits will equip volunteer caregivers in Africa with the practical materials they need to bring [...]

Ramping Up: Africa and the MDGs

It’s been a historical week in international development as leaders worldwide have ramped up discussions around meeting the 2015 Millennium Development Goals.  Increasingly (though not exclusively) Africa-specific concerns, the MDG conversation has generated some significant news over the past few days.  Below are links to the buzz: Yesterday’s UN Summit on the 2015 MDGs, a mid-way progress [...]

A Little Foresight, A Big Impact

A friend just sent me a link to an article from the BBC on the threat of wasted aid dollars in the developing world.   Normally I see articles (and books) on this subject related to how aid dollars have already been wasted.  This article, however, warns of the inefficiency of waiting until a crisis occurs [...]

Olympic Inspiration

Last week we highlighted Olympic marathoner Ryan Hall‘s fundraising page for World Vision on the Team Firstgiving Blog.  (By the way, Hall finished 10th in Beijing, helping the U.S. team to its best finish in 32 years). At Firstgiving, we know that endurance sports events have extraordinary power to inspire, especially when athletes are also [...]

2 Views on Development & Doing Good Well

If you’ve been involved in the discussion about poverty and international development in the past few years, you probably know the name Jeffrey Sachs.  Sachs is a development economist at Columbia University, advisor to the UN on the Millennium Development Goals, and author of the bestselling work, The End of Poverty.  You may or may not [...]

Four runners: which one are you?

What’s really interesting about working at Firstgiving is that we get to see such variety in the people who are raising money for the same cause at the same event. Today I noticed that four people who work here are all raising money for very different organizations but doing the same event, World Run Day. [...]