The Great Give 2017: 24 Hours to Change Our Community

John Studdard • Jan 25, 2017
The Great Give Palm Beach & Martin County is a 24-hour online giving event led by United Way of Palm Beach County, Nonprofits First, United Way of Martin County and Achieve. The goal of the Great Give is to raise as much money as possible for a slew of local nonprofits in just one day.

The Great Give first approached Achieve in November 2016 in hopes of creating a new website. The challenge: it would need to handle thousands of donors for 24-hours without crashing. We understand how important this day of giving is to local nonprofits, and that’s why we’re very excited to participate in this community-wide event that celebrates the spirit of giving.

After an initial kick-off meeting, the Achieve and Great Give stakeholders finalized their pre, live and post event deliverables. Their goal was to present a clean, easy-to-navigate website for their participants with a strong emphasis on creating a user-friendly registration process. Our team decided to leverage the extensibility and scalability of the Drupal open-source content management system to ensure the site could handle the sustained load of 24-hours of giving.

Website

Achieve launched phase one of the new Great Give website on Jan. 17. This custom-built Drupal site started accepting nonprofit applications immediately. Special note for Palm Beach and Martin County nonprofits — we strongly encourage you to registerif you haven’t done so. On May 17, phase two of the Great Give will launch a second custom-built page. From midnight to midnight, supporters will be able to donate and amplify the impact their charity has on the community. When the Great Give concludes, we will unveil a new page that recognizes the community for their generosity.

Nonprofit Education

In addition to being the Great Give’s technology partner, we wanted to ensure that our area nonprofits were in the best position to succeed.

Achieve’s Chief Strategy Officer, Kimberly Boyd will provide training sessions for all Great Give nonprofit participants. The sessions will include information on how to better market their organization and provide coaching on how to turn one-time donors into long-term donors.

The Achieve team will also make a marketing package available with information and best practices for search engine optimization (SEO).

In 2016 the Great Give raised $2.7M for 505 local nonprofits. Of those 505, 56 percent of the them raised at least $1,000 or more within the 24-hour period with the largest donation being awarded to The Pine School, closely followed by Boys and Girls Clubs of Palm Beach County and Chamber Music Society of Palm Beach. In addition to traditional donations, participating organizations can compete for hourly cash and otherwise valuable prizes. To sweeten the deal, every local gift made during the 24-hour period will be multiplied by additional dollars from a bonus pool raised by United Way of Palm Beach County.

We can’t wait to see the community come together and help raise critical funds for area nonprofits.

Are you interested in participating in this 24-hour online giving day? You can register your nonprofit online and let us know how we can help you achieve your goals.

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