We are a very small non-profit news organization who faces the same challenges of any non-profit to find and build a donor base. It is not surprising to anyone that in the last few years money has been a touch tight.

The UpTake has pioneered innovative strategies to record the news since we launched in 2007. We were one of, if not the first, news organization to strategically plan for the use social media as a reporting tool with our coverage of the Republican National Convention in Saint Paul in 2008. We reached out to the emerging Twitter users and in combination with the use of live-streamed video from cell phones, we were breaking stories about the police raids and protests on the streets. We have been pushing the boundaries of innovative coverage since then with the months long live coverage of the Al Franken vs. Norm Coleman recount and trial and as I write this the worker’s rights protests from Madison, Wisconsin and other regions around the country.

We do all this through our citizen-fueled newsroom, made up of a small staff of professional journalists in tandem with dozens of citizen journalists who want to be part of telling the stories important to them in their communities. This is difficult, technical and highly time-consuming work for our staff and volunteers. Much of the main-stream news—especially those who focus on video news—do not even cover many of the stories we do past a thirty second sound bite. It is essential then, that we find ways to raise money to continue our work.

GiveMN.org and Razoo have been an amazing resource for us. We started with more traditional online tools, but we were in the market for something that didn’t weigh us down with technical hassles and just simply worked. When the first Give to the Max Day was announced by GiveMN, we signed up and haven’t looked back.

We actually took it up a notch. In last year’s Give to the Max Day, we partnered with GiveMN and provided a day-long video live-stream of the event from the CoCo co-working and collaborative workspace downtown Saint Paul. We interviewed 80 or so Minnesota non-profits live on the air and broadcast that to our websites and any website that could embed our video player. The event was very well received and really helped show how interconnected the Minnesota non-profit community is and allowed each one of these non-profits that opportunity to reach out to a broader audience to help each of their fund-drives that day. Our experience with combining live online video and donor asks go way back to early 2008. We’ve seen our own support grow when we are live on-air and make donor asks. Testing this with a broader base came naturally to us, and we are proud to share our experience with the broader Minnesota non-profits who are also all struggling to do their important work.

GiveMN and Razoo have provided a reliable system for donors, flexibility in innovation and a simple back-end so we can keep all the donations organized. What else do you need?

We are however, innovators, so we are always looking at other tools, and we do use a journalistic focused one called Spot.us to help fund particular news stories. As it turns out though, in our recent drive to raise money for this worker’s rights story coming out of Madison and elsewhere, we found out donors like to have a choice of tools too. Spot.us provided a great platform to make a pitch, they help alert donors to story updates and have other very innovative “free credits” for donors to select for the stories, but many of our donors just wanted to use our Razoo system (some even asked for [shiver] PayPal, which we happily don’t use for this anymore). As of right now, more donors have supported this news story through Razoo than they have Spot.us. Spot.us has figured out a way to represent those donors into their system so we can show progress on the drive. 

Super awesome donors-tools of the world unite!!!

Look for more collaborations, partnerships and live-streams to come to help our greater community through these times of need. Remember next time when someone is talking through that little live-video box on your computer asking you for help, clicking that donate link helps us all continue this important work for our communities and innovating our way to a sustainable future.

Follow Jason on Twitter @JasonBarnett

When tragedy strikes we all want to find ways to help that make sense and help in effective, real ways. For ideas on organizations to support, the Council on Foundations has created a list of trusted philanthropic organizations that have mobilized to help provide emergency relief in Japan. The Minnesota Council on Foundations has general information about disaster giving at http://www.mcf.org/disaster-giving. And, our friends at the Charities Review Council have additional general information about disaster giving at http://www.smartgivers.org/disasterrelief.html.

To find additional Japan focused organizations or give to Japan relief efforts using a credit card, we've already set up fundraisers for two trusted organizations effectively responding in Japan: The American Red Cross (http://givemn.razoo.com/story/Japan-Earthquake-And-Tsunami-Disaster-Relief) and UK-based Shelterbox (http://givemn.razoo.com/story/HelpJapan)

We are a very small non-profit news organization who faces the same challenges of any non-profit to find and build a donor base. It is not surprising to anyone that in the last few years money has been a touch tight.

The UpTake has pioneered innovative strategies to record the news since we launched in 2007. We were one of, if not the first, news organization to strategically plan for the use social media as a reporting tool with our coverage of the Republican National Convention in Saint Paul in 2008. We reached out to the emerging Twitter users and in combination with the use of live-streamed video from cell phones, we were breaking stories about the police raids and protests on the streets. We have been pushing the boundaries of innovative coverage since then with the months long live coverage of the Al Franken vs. Norm Coleman recount and trial and as I write this the worker’s rights protests from Madison, Wisconsin and other regions around the country.

We do all this through our citizen-fueled newsroom, made up of a small staff of professional journalists in tandem with dozens of citizen journalists who want to be part of telling the stories important to them in their communities. This is difficult, technical and highly time-consuming work for our staff and volunteers. Much of the main-stream news—especially those who focus on video news—do not even cover many of the stories we do past a thirty second sound bite. It is essential then, that we find ways to raise money to continue our work.

GiveMN.org and Razoo have been an amazing resource for us. We started with more traditional online tools, but we were in the market for something that didn’t weigh us down with technical hassles and just simply worked. When the first Give to the Max Day was announced by GiveMN, we signed up and haven’t looked back.

We actually took it up a notch. In last year’s Give to the Max Day, we partnered with GiveMN and provided a day-long video live-stream of the event from the CoCo co-working and collaborative workspace downtown Saint Paul. We interviewed 80 or so Minnesota non-profits live on the air and broadcast that to our websites and any website that could embed our video player. The event was very well received and really helped show how interconnected the Minnesota non-profit community is and allowed each one of these non-profits that opportunity to reach out to a broader audience to help each of their fund-drives that day. Our experience with combining live online video and donor asks go way back to early 2008. We’ve seen our own support grow when we are live on-air and make donor asks. Testing this with a broader base came naturally to us, and we are proud to share our experience with the broader Minnesota non-profits who are also all struggling to do their important work.

GiveMN and Razoo have provided a reliable system for donors, flexibility in innovation and a simple back-end so we can keep all the donations organized. What else do you need?

We are however, innovators, so we are always looking at other tools, and we do use a journalistic focused one called Spot.us to help fund particular news stories. As it turns out though, in our recent drive to raise money for this worker’s rights story coming out of Madison and elsewhere, we found out donors like to have a choice of tools too. Spot.us provided a great platform to make a pitch, they help alert donors to story updates and have other very innovative “free credits” for donors to select for the stories, but many of our donors just wanted to use our Razoo system (some even asked for [shiver] PayPal, which we happily don’t use for this anymore). As of right now, more donors have supported this news story through Razoo than they have Spot.us. Spot.us has figured out a way to represent those donors into their system so we can show progress on the drive. 

Super awesome donors-tools of the world unite!!!

Look for more collaborations, partnerships and live-streams to come to help our greater community through these times of need. Remember next time when someone is talking through that little live-video box on your computer asking you for help, clicking that donate link helps us all continue this important work for our communities and innovating our way to a sustainable future.

Follow Jason on Twitter @JasonBarnett

When tragedy strikes we all want to find ways to help that make sense and help in effective, real ways. For ideas on organizations to support, the Council on Foundations has created a list of trusted philanthropic organizations that have mobilized to help provide emergency relief in Japan. The Minnesota Council on Foundations has general information about disaster giving at http://www.mcf.org/disaster-giving. And, our friends at the Charities Review Council have additional general information about disaster giving at http://www.smartgivers.org/disasterrelief.html.

To find additional Japan focused organizations or give to Japan relief efforts using a credit card, we've already set up fundraisers for two trusted organizations effectively responding in Japan: The American Red Cross (http://givemn.razoo.com/story/Japan-Earthquake-And-Tsunami-Disaster-Relief) and UK-based Shelterbox (http://givemn.razoo.com/story/HelpJapan)