Last week I was asked by a family friend to speak to her 8th grade class about volunteerism and fundraising with a focus on fundraising online. I jumped at the opportunity because I really believe that our upcoming generation is going to be heavily involved in giving back. Technology today has completely changed the way we communicate. It has become such a large part of our lives and will only continue to grow.
I prepared for the session by researching personal fundraising pages, volunteer communities and charity fundraising campaigns online. I wasn’t sure what to expect from a group of 8th graders. There was a good chance they were going to be nodding off in their chairs listening to someone talk about online fundraising and volunteering. To my surprise, when I got there and started mentioning what people are doing right now to give back to the community, they were fascinated.
I discussed how to use the Internet to fundraise and more specifically how to create your own Internet donation pages through sites like Crowdrise. Here, anyone can easily get online and start a personal fundraising page that they could send to their friends and family with the click of a button asking them to donate. This is the perfect tool for their generation and a lot of the students had questions about the site and were enlightened by the idea and how easy it was to donate. Since we were in a computer lab, I spent the last half hour helping them get their online fundraisers set up.
I was really pleased with how everything turned out. I felt like I had actually made some sort of impact on their views on fundraising and, most importantly, I think they understood that one person’s voice really can make a difference.
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