Our president and co-founder Desiree Vargas-Wrigley (@DesireeGF) will tell you that she was very nervous, but the reality is she knocked the presentation out of the park. That isn’t just my biased opinion either. PriceLine co-founder Jeff Hoffman approached Desiree and our other co-founder, Ethan Austin (@ethanaustin), later in the day and told them that the GiveForward presentation was one of the best he’d ever seen. That’s a huge compliment when you consider the fact that he has surely seen the way William Shatner presents his company’s services in all those commercials.

All in all, the event was a blast. We had a strong contingency of supporters in the house (of blues), almost all of whom were sporting their Giveasaurus T-shirts.

Desiree and Ethan have been in touch with a number of investors since the event, so we will see what kind of funding this all leads to and keep you all posted. In the meantime, I thought it would be fun to provide you with a chronologically arranged compilation of the Twitter updates I posted (@GiveForward) live from the event. Enjoy!

8:32 a.m.:
Today’s the big day! Less than two hours from now, Desiree and Ethan will pitch GiveForward to more than 200 investors. Live tweeting here.

10:14 a.m.:
Some might say this House of Blues is a strange place for business pitches, but in reality, it’s perfect because Desiree and Ethan rock.

10:25 a.m.:
We Giveasauri look down on these investors worth millions of dollars. Literally. They’re all on the ground floor and we’re in the balcony.

10:27 a.m.:
Ooooh we’re starting. Time for me to start tweeting more quietly.

10:30 a.m.:
One minute in to this bad boy and someone’s iPhone already rang loudly. #businessfolk

10:36 a.m.:
Founder of Sparknotes and OkCupid speaking now. This man is a saint in the eyes of every slacker with dating troubles.

10:39 a.m.:
This PowerPoint presentation about the power of ideas is both thought-provoking and thought-promoting. #ThisTweetABadIdea

10:54 a.m.:
I feel like I’m back in school right now. There’s a guy talking about his slideshow while everyone else is messing with their phones.

10:54 a.m.:
This speaker claims that a child-like curiosity is the key to entrepreneurship. I always thought it was money.

10:54 a.m.:
Desiree on stage!

11:10 a.m.:
Desiree just rocked that presentation! We are so proud and happy on this balcony that we’re like the negative of the dudes from The Muppets.

11:13 a.m.:
One of the investors just had a pretty intense sneezing fit. Dude, you’re supposed to give people funding, not the flu. #excelerate

11:30 a.m.:
Just realized that we probably should have chanted for Desiree to do an encore. This is a House of Blues, after all.

11:46 a.m.:
FanGo makes a mobile app that lets people order food and drinks right to their seats at sporting events. We want to test it here and now.

12:04 p.m.:
Lunch break. Only at a thing like this would a request have to be made that people not try to network until the session scheduled for later.

12:22 p.m.:
Curious to see where this clip from Ellen is going to take us. Fingers crossed for a guest appearance from Portia De Rossi.

12:25 p.m.:
Next speaker just used the term “Sweat Equity” in this video clip. Thanks for naming my next band, sir.

12:35 p.m.:
Same sneezer from earlier just struck again and homeboy on stage threw a “bless you” into his presentation without missing a beat. Awesome.

12:42 p.m.:
Can’t figure out why this dude speaking about social media isn’t Tweeting throughout. #hypocrisy

12:57 p.m.:
Erica just paid $4 for a bottled water. I think the House of Blues should invest in some fountains.

1:09 p.m.:
Talking Zebra video kicking off this next presentation. Not something I expected to see today.

1:25 p.m.:
Looking over this sea of iPads I get the sense that the people not doing their jobs are the ones on anything other than Facebook or Twitter.

1:32 p.m.:
I’ve heard so many numbers since this event started that I now understand what it feels like to be a phonebook. #GuessWhoIsGrowingDelirious

1:42 p.m.:
That’s a wrap! Thanks to Excelerate for a wonderful summer, and thank you all so much for your support. We’ll put pictures on our site soon.

It’s so cool to now be able to truthfully say that we’ve technically helped people raise millions of dollars, so we want to express our gratitude to not only Janet, but all of the people who have ever donated to fundraisers on GiveForward or encouraged their friends and family to do so. Thank you all so much! We couldn’t have made it this far without you, and if we may say so, we’re excited about our future together.

Those who have the pleasure of knowing Jonny Imerman are aware that he has almost exclusively worn an Imerman Angels shirt for the last three years. This all changed earlier this week, however, when Jonny donned our Giveasaurus shirt.

How did this once-in-a-century event come about? Well, it was the result of a recent burrito-eating contest between the GiveForward interns and the Imerman Angels interns.

The agreement heading into the contest was that a GiveForward victory would put Jonny in a Giveasaurus t-shirt for a day, while an Imerman Angels victory would leave our co-founder Ethan Austin in an Imerman Angels-branded banana suit for a week.

Even though the GiveForward squad ultimately came up short and lost the bet, Jonny and his Director of Operations, Aaron Hadley, were good sports and decided to wear the Givesaurus shirts anyway. We couldn’t believe our eyes when they sent us the picture. Enjoy this moment because you may never see Jonny in this shirt again… unless, of course, we win round two of the contest next year!

nom nom nom!

During this time, we’ve helped 1300 families raise almost $2 million for things like chemotherapy treatments, organ transplants and out-of-pocket living and travel expense. None of this would have been possible without our amazing community getting involved.  We appreciate the fundraising tips you have shared with us over the years, your positive (and occasionally negative) feedback and most importantly your willingness to spread the word about GiveForward to others who can benefit from our service!

Thank you all so much for your participation and support. We look forward to continuing to grow with you all for many years to come. For now though, we must go celebrate. And by that, of course, we mean burritos.

Sending out hugs, high fives and positive vibes!

- The GF Team

Step 1. Find a donor ahead of time willing to match up to $500, $1000 or some similar amount.  If you don’t have a single donor willing to contribute this amount, try asking 5 friends to each donate $200 and pool the money for a total of $1000.

Step 2. Create your group on Facebook with the message “For every person that joins this group, $1 will be donated to help [NAME OF YOUR FRIEND] fight cancer [OR FILL IN THE BLANK WITH ANY ILLNESS]“.  Ask your friends to ask their friends and spread the word to as many people as possible.  Also, make sure to let people know that the total amount will capped at $500, $1000 or whatever number you choose, so that your generous matching donor isn’t on the hook if 5000 people end up joining your group.  You might also want to set a time limit (e.g. two weeks).

Step 3. Once you have a large enough group, you can start asking group members for donations.  We’ve seen that the most successful fundraisers create a sense of urgency with their donors by creating time-sensitive “mini goals”.  For example, you might write something like:

“We’re trying to raise $2000 in the next 48 hours for [NAME OF FRIEND].  Please help us reach our goal by donating and spreading the word to your friends.”

Or if you can get someone to agree to become a matching donor, you might write something like:

“If we can raise $1000 in the next 24 hours, a generous donor has agreed to match it with another $2000.”

While this strategy takes a little bit of extra planning, we’ve seen it work incredibly well for our users in the past. Here is an example of a fundraiser on GiveForward that used this technique to create a Facebook group of nearly 4,000 members in just one week.  In total, they ended up raising over $88,000 on their GiveForward fundraising page.  Hopefully, this strategy will work as well for you as it did for them.

These events don’t have to be extravagant; a simple bar night, dinner function, bowling party or (legal) poker tournament could give your fundraiser a big boost. Simply think of what type of fun your friends might like to have and plan your event accordingly. If you already have a fundraising page set up on GiveForward, you can use that to sell pre-sale and/or raffle tickets in addition to collecting donations from those who can’t attend the event but would still like to contribute.

The inspiration for this fundraising tip actually comes from the “Team Nicole” fundraiser, which has just organized a cornhole tournament for September. Each team’s $40 entrance fee will go towards helping Nicole pay for breast cancer treatment, as will 15% of all food sales at the event and any donations made by spectators. It’s too bad we can’t get to Virginia for this tournament, but we’re sure it will be a smashing success!

If you need ideas on how to plan your own bar night, bowling party or soirée, here are a few more examples of people who have thrown successful fundraising events. You can check out their pages to see what they did right!

Organizers of the “Minty Python Benefit” fundraiser sold raffle tickets and earned more than $20,000 to help a young girl with a rare type of brain cancer.

Organizers of the “Ronai-Going-Away Party and Fundraiser” sold pre-sale tickets and raffle tickets on their GiveForward page and raised more than $12,000 to help pay for chemotherapy and radiation treatments for their friend.

The combination of online and offline fundraising is clearly one that we wholeheartedly recommend. If any of you decide to throw a cool event that happens to be in the Chicago area, please let us know; we’re always up for a good time to help out a good cause!

"GiveForward is a game changer for those battling cancer and facing mounting medical expenses. I definitely recommend GiveForward to anyone wondering what they can do to help out when a friend or loved one is diagnosed." - Ethan Zohn, Cancer Survivor

A while back I had the chance to attend the OMG Cancer Summit for young adults in New York presented by I2Y and Leukemia and Lymphoma Society.

While there were a ton of really great speakers at the Summit like Adam Ostrow, Brad Ludden, Tamika Felder, Jonny Imerman and Matthew Zachary, for me, the best was keynote speaker and former Survivor winner, Ethan Zohn.  Maybe it’s because Ethan and I both share the same name, a love of soccer and had fathers pass away from colon cancer at an early age.  Or maybe it’s simply because we both happen to rock the jew-fro, but something about his speech really hit home with me.

In 2009 Ethan was diagnosed with a type of cancer called non-hodgkins lymphoma. In his keynote, Ethan talked about how the first thing he did when he was diagnosed was go straight to People magazine to share his battle with the world. Whereas most people would have kept their battle private, Ethan knew that by sharing his battle, he would spread awareness and help get more young people diagnosed at early stages while the cancer is still treatable.

What really hit home for me about the keynote, however, is the fact that Ethan’s public battle actually led someone to GiveForward.  (Small world, right?).  During his speech, Ethan told a story about a young man named Ben who was diagnosed with non-hodgkins lymphoma after his mother read the People Magazine article and realized Ben the same symptoms. Shortly thereafter, Ben’s family started a Giveforward fundraising page and raised $2000 to help pay for Ben’s cancer treatments.  And not surprisingly, Ethan was one of the first people to donate to the page.  When I caught up with Ethan after the speech, I asked him about Ben’s fundraiser and what he thought about GiveForward.  Here’s what he had to say:

“GiveForward is a game changer for those battling cancer and facing mounting medical expenses. I definitely recommend GiveForward to anyone wondering what they can do to help out when a friend or loved one is diagnosed.”

“A game-changer”…We like the sound of that!  Thanks for the kind words, Ethan.  We’ll be keeping up with you and all the great work you’re doing for those in the young adult cancer community!

This actually isn’t too surprising because we recently learned that roughly 25 million Americans are living with rare diseases. Most people have probably never heard of these ailments and thus don’t even think to help because they aren’t aware that their help is needed. We are very excited by the indication that we might be able to help bridge this gap, however.

We currently have people fundraising for: a woman undergoing treatment for angiosarcoma, a rare and aggressive cancer; a woman undergoing treatment for hemangiopericytoma, another rare type of cancerous tumor; and a 2-year-old undergoing brain surgery as a result of complications brought on by Sturge-Weber Syndrome.

It’s good to see these folks getting the help they need, and it’s also nice to see an increased awareness – even if just around this office – with regards to these rare diseases.

If you have a rare disease (or you know anyone who does) and you want to help get the word out, email a little bit of information to dshar@giveforward.org.

We want to thank Laci and everyone else who participated in the Giveasaurus Challenge.  Altogether, this edition’s participants raised more than $70,000 for things like healthcare for children, chemotherapy, and out of pocket expenses for loved ones. Great work, folks. We hope the next Giveasaurus Challenge — which might happen sooner than you think — will be just as successful (if not more)!

If you are interested in applying, please send a resume and a short cover letter explaining why you want to work with us to jobs@giveforward.org.

Please include which position you are applying for in the subject line. We are currently hiring for the following positions:

This could be you...

Fundraising Coach Extraordinaire: Are you a fundraising king or queen? Do you enjoy helping people and coming up with creative ways to raise money for good causes? If so, you could be perfect for this position.

We need someone who is an excellent communicator both with emails and on the phone.

Responsibilities will include:

* Working closely with individuals and organizations to help them better understand the ins and outs of online fundraising  (don’t worry, if you don’t know the ins and outs, we’ll teach you)

* Reaching out to new users to help them do a better job of fundraising

* Serving as the “face” of GiveForward to the Giveforward community and the outside world

* Issuing checks and personalizing the letters we send to beneficiaries

* Ensuring that our users have the absolute best user experience possible

Social Media Maven: Do you have more friends on Facebook than anyone you know? Are you a YouTube junkie? Does TwitterAddict have nothing on you? Well, then you might be just the person we’re looking for.

3+ yrs experience with Mafia Wars, Farmville and Cafe World required

We need someone who is confident using a variety of social media tools and who understands the importance of building an online community.

Responsibilities include:

* Growing our Fan base on Facebook and interacting with our Fans

* Tweeting and interacting with our following on Twitter

* Helping us to develop and implement our social media marketing strategy

******************************************************************

About the internship…

Please note that all positions are unpaid. We offer course credit for those whose schools accept internship credits and bonus opportunities exist throughout the internship.

If you have any questions about these positions before you apply, please feel free to email ethan@GiveForward.org

A little bit more about our internship program

This isn’t your normal internship.  It is way awesomer! We assign real responsibilities to all of our team members and expect everyone to produce results.  We also believe work should be fun as well. We are a young company (no one here is older than 29) and we try not to take ourselves too seriously (we throw a drunken ugly sweater pub crawl each year). Bottom line, your internship will be a healthy mix of work and play and should provide you with a meaningful experience that we hope you will enjoy.

WORK: Some of the things GiveForward interns accomplished over the past year:

* Coached our users to help them raise over $1.6 million for medical fundraisers and other good causes
* Helped plan and promote a 175+ person charity benefit event as well as the “world famous” Ugly Sweater Pub Crawl
* Developed and maintained GiveForward’s Twitter and Facebook accounts
* Helped us maintain the highest standards for customer relations
* Wrote news stories, fundraising tips and feature articles for our blog
* Designed GiveForward T-shirts and marketing materials such as online ads and pamphlets
* Developed and implemented buzz marketing campaigns including creating a CityChase GiveForward Chase Point, the GiveForward Lemonade Stand, and a Christmas in July GiveForward Newsletter campaign

Cool staff? Check. Awesome Job? Check. Giveasauruses? Double Check.

PLAY: Here are a few of the intern activities that take place at GiveForward

* Participation in Chicago’s CityChase
* YELP + GiveForward Charity Scavenger Hunt
* Birthday Lunches
* Administered free hugs all around Chicago
* Participation in team t-shirt design contests
* Our “Beer Pong for Snuggies” Contest
* The “Interns Only” Summer BBQ
* Participation in GiveForward Lemonade Stand
* Our world-famous Ugly Sweater Charity Pub Crawl
* The Interns vs. Bosses 2 lb Chipotle Burrito eating contest
*…but even better, the First Ever Intern vs. Intern Burrito eating contest