Webutante Ball 2011
The 2011 Webutante Ball raised over $50,000 for the Michael J. Fox Foundation.
Spring Happy Hour
BackSpin 2011
Held in February 2011, BackSpin 2011 was an Xbox Kinect ping pong tournament for charity. Our chosen cause was Child’s Play, which provides games and equipment for children to hospitals across North America. The event raised over $12,000 for the cause.
BackSpin 2011 consisted of a 32-person singles tournament and a 16-team company tournament. For more details on BackSpin 2011, visit backspin2011.eventbrite.com.
The Webutante Ball 2010
In June 2010 we partnered with Gawker.tv to produce The Webutante Ball. The event attracted sponsors such as Pepsi, Dentyne, Etsy, and Groupon, and raised over $26,000 for City Harvest’s “Skip Lunch, Fight Hunger” campaign.
Foursquare Partnership: December 2009
TechiesGiveBack’s first event was in December of 2009. We chose CampInteractive as their partner charity. CampInteractive seeks to empower inner city youth by providing them with outdoor experiences and teaching technology-based skills. We wanted to provide an opportunity for mentors to have a hands-on volunteer experience with the CampInteractive kids, and also to raise funds for CampInteractive as an organization.
We organized an ice skating event at Chelsea Piers. Mentors were asked to buy a ticket which covered the cost of themselves and a CampInteractive youth to go skating for the afternoon. The event was a success with 40 kids and 80 volunteers participating in the activity.
We also wanted to find a unique, innovative channel for fundraising which would be compelling to the New York tech community and allow “as many people to be involved as possible.”
Foursquare comes on board
We approached Foursquare co-founder Dennis Crowley, and together generated the idea of a Foursquare leaderboard sponsorship. The idea was simple: find a corporation that would sponsor all New York check-ins on Foursquare during the week of the volunteer event. Every time a user checked in, money would be donated to the charity involved, CampInteractive.
Pepsi follows suit
To choose the sponsor, we put the opportunity up for auction on Twitter. Foursquare helped to raise awareness by blogging about the initiative, giving an example of a $0.03/check-in pledge. Pepsi won the auction (conducted on Twitter) with a promise of $0.04/check-in. For Pepsi, it provided a unique opportunity to get involved with charitable giving in line with its “Refresh Everything” strategy while capitalizing on mobile cultural trends.
Total funds raised
The 223,149 check-ins generated $8,925.96 and Pepsi generously upped that to a $10,000 contribution. In addition, the activity side of the event – ice-skating – raised $2,500, bringing a total of $12,500 for CampInteractive.
Due to the buzz generated by the campaign, an anonymous family foundation learned of the cause. They had a few days left to allocate $50,000 in charitable funds. They saw CampInteractive as closely aligned with their goals and decided to contribute that full allotment to the cause. All in, the TechiesGiveBack + Pepsi + Foursquare partnership resulted in charitable contributions of $62,500 to CampInteractive.