DonorsChoose Fundraiser
drorzel | November 2, 2008It's now November, so the annual DonorsChoose fundraiser is officially over. According to the official leader board, at the time of this writing, ScienceBlogs has raised just under $30,000, from 302 donors, funding projects that will help 9,810 students. Those numbers may increase in the next day or two, as I think a lot of people have yet to allocate their share of Seed's contribution.
(The overall total is down a good bit from last year's $69,000, but given the cratering economy and the election sucking all the air out of the room, that's probably to be expected.)
Many thanks to everyone…
drorzel | October 27, 2008As has already been noted by people with too much free time, my DonorsChoose challenge stands at $6,254. This is a big jump, and happened because somebody emailed to ask whether a donation of theirs had been counted; when I logged in to check, I found that there was $715 in account credits, which I believe are donations that didn't get made to a specific project. I'm not sure how that happened.
Anyway, even though I'm not sure of the origin of those (it's possible they're left over from last year), I put them toward the current challenge projects, because it seemed the honest thing to do. If…
drorzel | October 26, 2008Another day, another DonorsChoose incentive claimed. I'm actually late in responding to this one-- I missed my self-imposed 24-hour deadline because we're visiting Kate's parents outside of Boston, but I'll try to make up for it with the answer. Anyway, Helen asks:
How did Emmy become part of your household?
We decided we wanted a dog, and spent a bunch of time talking to local rescue groups and visiting animal shelters. We didn't have much luck, because people kept getting to the dogs we wanted before us, but persistence paid off eventually. The Mohawk and Hudson River Humane Society had a…
drorzel | October 23, 2008As part of my intermittent series of posts highlighting particular individual projects, here's a request for basic scientific equipment for a school in Manhattan:
You will make it possible for my students to develop a greater understanding of the nature and the process of science by contributing these basic materials for my science class. The hands on activities will increase student curiosity and minimize boredom and talk in the teaching of science.
My students need 15 lab coats in order to conduct ongoing science experiments, 15 thermometers in order to carry out experiments that involve…
drorzel | October 22, 2008Another question from a generous donor, in this case Natalie, who asks:
As for my question, how about "who is your favorite author, and why?" or, if you'd rather, "what's your favorite book, and why?"
This is a difficult question, because it's subject to a sort of quantum projection noise. That is, my "favorite book" and "favorite author" exist in a sort of quantum superposition of all the various possibilities. When someone asks, I can give an answer and either the wavefunction collapses to that value at that instant, or the universe splits into many parallel universes, each with its own…
drorzel | October 21, 2008"Donate to my dad's DonorsChoose challenge, or I will pop you right in the mouth!"
"Bang! Zoom! To the Moon!"
You don't want to mess with her-- she's fierce. So please give generously.
For those keeping track, the current tally, at the time of this typing, is $4,887. Or, for the figure you really care about, that's $1,113 before I have to dance like a monkey.
That offer has brought in a little over $3,000 since last Wednesday, which is pretty impressive. There's been nothing at all since late Saturday night, though, so we may have tapped out the monkeyphiles.
drorzel | October 17, 2008I have to say, I had no idea that offering to dance like a monkey would be quite so appealing. Apparently, though, it's a big hit-- John Scalzi proclaimed it "the comedy highlight of 2008." This, from a year featuring Tina Fey as Sarah Palin.
In the two days since Scalzi's post, donations have jumped from $1,700 to almost $4,200. Which still isn't $6,000, so I'm not dancing yet, but I am making sure I know how to record video with the webcam, because the whole thing looks disturbingly possible....
Feel free to provide suggestions on what dancing like a monkey would look like. YouTube isn't…
drorzel | October 16, 2008Another DonorsChoose incentive claimed: Ewan asks for a blog post about "the neatest attractions in Albany and the surrounding area."
"Neatest" is in the eye of the beholder, of course, and as is the case with any area, the worst people to ask about local tourism are local residents (ask a Manhattanite how often they visit the Statue of Liberty). Kate and I don't do a lot of sight-seeing.
What culture we do get mostly comes in the form of concerts and the like, and there are several venues for that sort of thing in the area. The Egg hosts a lot of different sorts of shows, and the Troy…
drorzel | October 15, 2008Today, we have the first claimant of a donation incentive, from Sarah, who asks:
If you could go back in time to any lab and be there as X discovery was being made, which lab/when/where would you go? I figure this could be spun a couple of ways, either to talk about some really cool science or some really interesting personalities/history of science stuff, or both.
She suggests either the modern discovery of BEC, or the Michelson-Morley experiment for a historical entry. Both of these are excellent choices-- I was on the periphery of a group chasing BEC in 1995, and it was an exciting time,…
drorzel | October 15, 2008First and foremost, thank you to everybody who has donated to my DonorsChoose challenge this year. At the time of this writing, we've raised just over $1,700, temporarily good enough for first place on the ScieceBlogs leader board.
If you haven't contributed yet, we've got lots of incentives to try to get you to contribute. In addition to the various incentives I described this weekend, the Corporate Masters are once again raffling off prizes ranging from magazine subscriptions to an iPod Touch. Janet has the details.
If even that's not enough, I said back at the beginning of this that I…
drorzel | October 12, 2008As you have no doubt noticed, the annual DonorsChoose fundraiser is under way, raising money to help school teachers and children. You can < ahref="http://www.donorschoose.org/donors/viewChallenge.html?id=19006">donate directly through my challenge, but you can also help them out by voting for them in the AMEX Members Project. Voting runs through midnight Monday, and is free, though you need to have an American Express card to vote. If they win the vote, they get $1.5 million, which is a bit more than ScienceBlogs is going to swing.
If you opt for donating through my challenge, you may…
drorzel | October 8, 2008As the DonorsChoose fundraiser rolls along, I'm making an effort to highlight a few worthwhile proposals from my challenge entry, in case the lack of specificity is keeping people from donating. This time out, that's the "Sizzling Science" proposal, from Broward County, FL. This description echoes sentiments that are frequently expressed here and elsewhere in blogdom:
What does a scientist look like? My students need to know that a scientist looks just like them. In fact, they are scientists. They can think like a scientist, hypothesize like a scientist, experiment like a scientist and then…
drorzel | October 6, 2008The Empress of Eastern New York is dissatisfied:
Why? Because at this point, my DonorsChoose Challenge entry has only raised $475 from 7 donors. A bunch of theorists are cleaning our clocks.
This makes SteelyKid grumpy. And we don't want a grumpy baby.
To put things into perspective, this blog gets about 2,000 hits per day, so the challenge goal of $6,000 amounts to just $3 per daily hit. So, if something you read here gave you at least $3 worth of amusement, please click and contribute. If you do, we'll have a happy SteelyKid:
And isn't that better?
For a larger donation, you can claim one…
drorzel | October 2, 2008Over the course of the next month, I'll be highlighting some of the proposals in my DonorsChoose challenge, to let you know the benefits you can provide. Some of the proposals are heartbreakingly basic, asking for things like copy paper, but this is a science blog, so let's look at some science proposals. For example, "I Do, Therefore I Learn":
"Science is boring!"
I hear this phrase from students all too often. Despite the use of colorful, informational textbooks, Science is often dreaded by students. Having witnessed the astounding learning opportunities from hands on projects in Science,…
drorzel | October 1, 2008As you may or may not recall, last year's DonorsChoose fundraiser featured a few... unusual offers. At one point late in the proceedings, I offered to read and review a New Atheist screed for $1000 in new donations. And, since I had previously said that I would rather stab myself with a fork than read The God Delusion, I said I would stab myself with a fork for $750 in new donations.
I'm already offering a couple of aspirational incentives-- custom dog dialogues or a copy of the book-in-progress-- but I feel like I ought to have something to offer for passing the big milestones in this year's…
drorzel | October 1, 2008As we have the past few years, the folks here at ScienceBlogs will be running a fundraiser for the educational charity DonorsChoose. If you haven't been around for the past versions, the way it works is you go to their site via my challenge page, and review proposals submitted by teachers asking for funds to buy materials or put on programs that would benefit their students. If you find one you like, you give them money, and that money goes directly to the teacher making the request, to fund the proposed items.
Because everything's more fun when it's competitive, there's a challenge aspect to…
drorzel | August 5, 2008Here's the deal: Big Think is running a charitable donation program for everybody's favorite educational charity, DonorsChoose, and they've gotten Pfizer to agree to donate $1 for each of the first 10,000 visitors to vote for a video on Big Think's site.
Go to http://www.bigthink.com/thinksciencenow/, pick a video, and click on "Vote for This Video Profile," and Pfizer coughs up a buck. You don't even need to watch the video, if you don't want to.
It's simple, it's easy, and it steers money to a good cause. What more could you ask?
drorzel | May 1, 2008Thank-you cards and notes have been trickling in from the DonorsChoose fundraiser last fall, most of which I haven't bothered to post. The latest batch had two pictures that were too good not to pass along, though:
And:
I guess they liked the science stuff.
(I've smudged out the names, just because.)
drorzel | November 8, 2007Ethan Zuckerman (who is on the Wikimedia Advisory Board) has a post discussing Wikipedia's recent fundraising drive, with some comparative numbers:
In the past 17 days, the [Wikimedia] Foundation has raised over $478,000 in online gifts. That's a pretty amazing number, on the one hand, and a concerning one, on the other hand. If Global Voices could raise that much money online in a month, I'd be out of a job, as our annual budget is not much higher than that sum, and I spend far too much of my time convincing generous individuals, corporations and foundations to support our efforts.
On the…
drorzel | November 8, 2007I got a thank-you email yesterday from the head of DonorsChoose, which I will quote here. Because, well, you're the ones who coughed up the cash, not me:
Thanks in great part to the attention you generated, we made Internet history! During the month of October, readers of more than a hundred blogs gave $420,000 to classroom projects on DonorsChoose.org, benefiting 75,000 students. To put that in perspective, it took four months for the hugely successful Facebook causes application--with millions of users--to generate that sum of donations across all causes.
We would not have helped so many…