All posts by Katie Lorah

Fundraising in winter: How to get attention & dollars for your community project after the holidays

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Toward the end of each year, many Americans give more than thanks and gifts.

The six-or-so winter weeks between Giving Tuesday (the Tuesday after Thanksgiving) and the start of the New Year is when one third of annual giving takes place. 

That’s great news, but it does beg the question: how do you fundraise in winter when the holiday rush is over? After all, even for the most committed winter fans, come January and February the cold and grey days inevitably start to drag on. How can people and organizations trying to better their communities still build enthusiasm and fundraise effectively once giving season is over, and it’s just plain old winter? (Or maybe for you it begs the question: “I started this project, but now I’m wondering if the timing is all wrong. Help!”)

Continue reading Fundraising in winter: How to get attention & dollars for your community project after the holidays →

AWESOME PROJECT: A hotline for low-income victims of workplace sexual harassment

Awesome Project

In this wild, historic, sea change moment for women’s rights – marked by the global #MeToo and Time’s Up movements – a very small Brooklyn-based legal center is working to give voice to low-income, disempowered victims of workplace sexual harassment. The women we don’t hear speaking up in the news. The women who don’t have movie credits or extra letters behind their names. The women who might be most afraid to speak up, and could have more than anyone to lose. Janitors, restaurant workers, undocumented immigrants.

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Nerd alert! Shiny new data about our ioby community and fundraising!

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How does ioby staff help project leaders decide which fundraising strategies are best? Well, up to this point, experience, “best practices,” and intuition have been our guide. ioby Leader Success Strategists, ioby’s in-house fundraising coaches, have supported 1,400 ioby Leaders in raising over $4 million in funding. They’ve done this work for years. “We have a pretty good sense for which strategies are helpful to ioby Leaders and which are duds” says Lauren Patti, Leader Success Strategist since 2014, “but we can do even better.”

Continue reading Nerd alert! Shiny new data about our ioby community and fundraising! →

How to turn a vacant lot into a community garden: A primer

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In December, we posted about ways to find out who owns vacant lots in your neighborhood. One reason we thought ioby readers might be interested in this topic is that so many of you lead the charge to turn vacant lots into active amenities like community gardens. So cool!

The first step in this endeavor is usually to find out who owns the land you’re eyeing, which can take some digging. Below, we outline the next steps many ioby Leaders have told us they’ve taken to turn the empty lot on their block into a flourishing green oasis.

Continue reading How to turn a vacant lot into a community garden: A primer →

Thank you for the strength, positivity, and hope this year.

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To our ioby community:

It’s no secret that 2017 has been a difficult year for communities across the U.S. and its territories. Yet, somehow you—our ioby community—put more funds into our neighborhoods faster than ever before. In these unprecedented times, we at ioby have looked to you and found strength, positivity, and hope.

Continue reading Thank you for the strength, positivity, and hope this year. →

“Whose land is this?” How to find out who owns vacant lots in your neighborhood

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If you walk around any city or town in America, you’ll see them. If you have one in your neighborhood, you’ve certainly wondered how it came to be there. If you’re like many in our ioby community, you imagine all the great things you could do with it.

Why, it’s the ubiquitous vacant lot!

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AWESOME PROJECT: Help fund repairs for a beloved community garden in the Bronx

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Sometimes a community garden just needs a little extra TLC, and this is one of those times for the Bryant Hill Community Garden, in the Bronx. One of only two community gardens in the South Bronx, and an easy 5 minute walk away for half of all Hunts Point residents – whose neighborhood is a food desert with asthma-triggering air quality – it’s desperately needed, and brimming with potential. Unfortunately, its vegetation and stone pathways, battered by years of rainstorms, are also brimming with debris.

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A first look at our new partnership with the City of Boston!

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Do you know about “third spaces?” Even if you’re not familiar with the term, you certainly do. If we think of our homes as our first space, and our workplace as our second space, then a third space is anywhere else we regularly spend time and that’s part of the fabric of our neighborhood: community centers, barber shops, libraries, parks, cafes, and even sidewalks are all good examples.

Third spaces are where most ioby projects take place. Soon, we hope a lot more of them will be starting up in Boston, where we’re embarking on a new partnership with the Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics (MONUM) to bring ioby to community-based organizations and residents with awesome ideas for their neighborhoods’ third spaces.

Continue reading A first look at our new partnership with the City of Boston! →

10 great crowdfunding projects for nonprofit arts organizations

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Nonprofit arts organizations help people express themselves and build community to create new ways of looking at the world. In order to do this well, arts groups need to juggle many priorities, from planning programs to spreading awareness on social media to enlisting volunteers – and of course, there’s FUNDRAISING.  At ioby, we think crowdfunding can be an important tool in every nonprofit’s toolkit, and arts nonprofits have been some of our greatest fundraisers.

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AWESOME PROJECT: MuslimARC is coming home to Detroit

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When Namira Islam had just finished law school and taken the bar exam four years ago, she paused for breath, and went online to check in with her friends and communities. She had thought about the ways in which she’d felt discriminated against during her life – both as a Bangladeshi immigrant in America, and as a non-Arab in the Muslim community – and found herself drawn to the dialogue on exclusion happening on Twitter.

Continue reading AWESOME PROJECT: MuslimARC is coming home to Detroit →