This Chicago nonprofit is helping you fight hunger instead of getting socks

by Andreas Rekdal
December 1, 2015

It's that time of year again — time to make a holiday gift list. 

Maybe, like many of us, you just don't need more material things. Feeding America is offering a new alternative for gifting this year.

This holiday season, the Chicago-based organization is launching a new fundraising platform called Set the Table, which lets users turn special occasions into opportunities for giving back.

The idea is simple. Say you’re getting married, but you already have all the kitchen supplies you’ll ever need. Rather than set up a registry, you can create a fundraising campaign on Set the Table and ask friends and family to make donations in lieu of gifts.

Elizabeth Nielsen, Vice President of Digital Engagement at Feeding America, said the goal was to draw on the success of peer-to-peer fundraising platforms like Kickstarter, and make charitable giving more user friendly and socially engaging.

“A lot of people want to give to Feeding America and hunger relief causes during the holidays. This is just a great way to engage, and to fill that need throughout the holidays and throughout the year,” Nielsen said.

In addition to enhancing current fundraising efforts, Nielsen hopes initiatives like Set the Table will help Feeding America reach new audiences:

“Things like Set the Table may engage a younger donor audience,” said Nielsen. “Those do-gooder Millennials or Gen Y, who aren’t at that point in their lives where they can become loyal charitable givers year over year, but who may have large social networks to whom they can reach out. They can help us engage their peers with our mission and we can cultivate them as the next generation of individual givers for our organization.”

Feeding America has years of experience with leveraging technology to support its mission. Last week, NPR’s Planet Money team dedicated an entire episode to the organization’s system for allocation of donated food items among member food banks. In collusion with local food bank directors and economists from the University of Chicago, Feeding America created an eBay-like marketplace that let individual food banks bid on food items using “shares,” an internal virtual currency that allowed food bank directors to make priorities based on their communities’ specific needs.

In creating Set the Table, Nielsen’s team put a lot of work into making fundraising just as easy as donating:

“Someone who creates a fund has an easy to use interface to see who has given to them so that they can thank them, both via email and social media, and there’s a social activation tool kit available behind the scenes,” Nielsen said. “We wanted to make sure we were recognizing the fundraisers with milestones and coaching along the way, to recognize their success.”

Go ahead and give it a try this holiday season. Unless you really need those new wool socks.

Photo via Facebook.

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