Transcript
Susan Swan Smith: What drives me every day is know that we’re doing good in the community. That drives me. That makes it easy to come to work. And this team that I work with is great.
We’re all here to make it easy and effective for people to give.
Cathryn McClellan: I really get to see the impact my job has on the community. I get to hear the stories of nonprofits who’ve received funding through North Texas Giving Day, through a donor who found a nonprofit that they didn’t know about but they’re avid volunteers now.
And it’s really amazing to see that a little bit of money can go such a long way in our community. And it’s fun because I know that everything I’m doing every day is really helping the community be doing better than it already is.
And really making a difference in North Texas, that’s…you just don’t get to do that at every job.
Susan: North Texas Giving Day is all about raising money for North Texas nonprofits. North Texas Giving Day started in 2009. And as hard as it is to believe now, but online giving was not all that common then.
Lots of nonprofit organizations couldn’t take gifts through their own websites, so North Texas Giving Day was a way for people to come together to give online and to expand generosity.
Dave Scullin: The first year we were blown away that we generated $4 million. Fast forward to year nine—we generated $39 million from almost 80,000 donors to support 2,700 nonprofits. It’s just become this enormously successful event. It’s the largest in the country.
Susan: You know giving really feels great. And we’re giving people the opportunity to support nonprofits.
We want to give everybody who wants to be a chance to be a philanthropist for a day.
Cathryn: That’s the best part about North Texas Giving Day is that it’s truly for everyone. So, from that one-dollar donor to that $10,000 donor, we want everyone to come together and give to their favorite local nonprofits to really make a difference in our region.
So, every gift counts, every dollar matters—we’re truly making a difference when we all come together.
Susan: The day of, we have got a war room going on in our boardroom downstairs with big monitors tracking everything that’s going on—from phone calls to web traffic. We’ve got teams of people starting at 4:30 in the morning down at channel 8 for Daybreak, so we’ve got people there with a bunch of nonprofits.
Everybody here does something. They answer the phones, we’ve got a half dozen events going on throughout the region—we’ve got to have performance, reliability and security. And Aldridge is there with us throughout.
The beauty of North Texas Giving Day is that just about anybody can be involved. If you’re generous, if you have any causes that you like—it’s really easy to go online and to give that day.
We like to say that North Texas Giving Day is all about building the power and spirit of giving. It’s an opportunity for the whole community to come together, to power all the organizations that make our community so much stronger.
North Texas Giving Day has grown exponentially since its founding almost 10 years ago. And it’s an incredible testament to the generosity of this community we live in and to the great work that the nonprofits in North Texas are doing.
We now have 10 days of scheduled giving in honor of our tenth anniversary. So, you can give anytime between September 10th and September 20th. You go to the NorthTexasGivingDay.org website and it makes it really easy to give to one organization, or 10 organizations, or 100.
The sky’s the limit for the next five years of North Texas Giving Day. We want to be raising $100 million in a day from half a million donors for 5,000 nonprofits. And we think we can do it.
For more information about Communities Foundation of Texas and North Texas Giving Day, visit their websites.
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