When the home of Ron Wallace was burning down the day before Thanksgiving, he never thought he would be visited by another fire victim who would provide him with hope to help him get through this tragedy.

But at that moment, Tara, who lost her own home to a fire in January 2011, happened to be driving  by Ron’s home.  She happened to be in the right place at the right time and stopped to give Ron a tote of essentials to help him take care of himself and alleviate the stress of losing his home.

The tote that Tara gave to Ron actually came from Tara’s Totes, a site she created after losing her own home to a fire. Now Tara is dedicated to creating totes of essentials to help people like Ron.

Before the fire, Ron was unable to afford to make necessary repairs to his house to qualify for insurance, so rebuilding is going to be much harder than typical families who are in the same unfortunate situation.

Tara felt that there was more she could do to help out Ron, so she looked to GiveForward.com to create a fundraising page as a place where others in the community can contribute to Ron’s expenses.  Ron’s Fire Fund has created a way for members of their Wisconsin community to show their financial support as Ron rebuilds his home, and their emotional support as Ron mourns the loss of his canine companion, Klutz, who unfortunately did not survive the tragic fire.

Take a moment to check out their page and send some support their way.

To allow staff members time to celebrate the holidays and visit with family, the GiveForward offices will be closed from Friday December 23rd 5:00 PM until Monday January 2nd 9:00 AM.  Fundraising coaches will be periodically checking emails for urgent inquiries, so feel free to email us with any questions at info@giveforward.com. If you are awaiting payment for your closed fundraiser, we will still be sending payments even though we are not in the office, so be sure to check your email for confirmation when payment has been sent. Happy Holidays!

This holiday season, we’re inviting all the members of the GiveForward community to Adopt a Fundraiser! As an organizer of a fundraiser, you can sign up to have your fundraiser adopted by someone you may not know who just wants to help out with your fundraising efforts.  By taking part, you will have lots of holiday cheer coming your way from a fellow GiveForward user! Happy holidays, indeed!

Have you seen some of the GiveForward pages that have an “Updates” tab at the top of their fundraiser? As an organizer, this is your way to keep all your friends, family & donors informed; it will also keep them interested in the fundraising efforts in hopes that they will continue to spread the word about your page. Want to know how to make one?

- To make an Update, log into your user account where it says “Welcome back, [your name]“.

- Scroll down to the blue bar that contains the title of your fundraiser, and underneath that you should see a list of functions and features for helping you manage your fundraiser.

-The 5th choice down is “Create & Edit Updates”. If you click that, it will take you to the updates page where you can title your update, upload a picture, and create your update.

- Make sure to check the box that emails the update automatically to all your supporters!

Want a free iPad? We know you do! Here’s how to win one:

“Like” GiveForward on Facebook. This should be easy since we already know you like us just from being a user on our site Go to our new GiveForward page on Facebook and “like” us.  This will automatically enter you into a drawing for a brand new iPad.  After you have done this, get extra chances to win (and extra brownie-points on our radar of awesomeness) by telling us what Giving Forward means to you on our Facebook wall.

Thanks for helping us cross over to our new Facebook page so we can keep all of our Giveasauruses in one central place and part of the GiveForward community!

… more details here

When you add updates to your GiveForward page, you can now upload a picture to go along with the update. This is great for a couple reasons:

- Did you know… the update you create gets sent to your donors? So any image that you upload with the update will be included with the email that goes out.

- If you’re creating an update to your donors about an upcoming local event you’re organizing, you could add an image of the poster/flier you created for the offline event.

- Updating your friends and family about any changes in the beneficiary’s well-being are greatly enhanced if you include a picture of them while visiting with loved ones in the hospital, for example.

- Any photo that is uploaded to an update is automatically added to the photo gallery on your GiveForward page! This makes it a lot easier to add recent pictures to the page along with the update in one easy step!

We’re super excited to roll out a new feature that so many of you have asked for– you can now keep track of the emails sent through the GiveForward site.  This means that in your user account, you will have your very own address book and message history to help you arrange and manage all the invitations you send to your friends and family telling them about your GiveForward page!

The address book will allow you to import your contacts from an outside mail provider, like Gmail, Yahoo or MSN.  You can keep all your friends and family organized in the same place as your donors.  This allows you to send messages that are designed specifically for certain groups of people, so that you can make more personalized invitations, thank you messages, and reminders.

The message history will allow you to track what messages were sent for each fundraiser.  This organization of messages will help you in seeing what messages you have already sent and to what groups of people you have sent them to.

GiveForward is hiring summer interns for our Chicago office, and we’re looking to you- our users- to help us find the perfect candidates!  Know someone in the Chicagoland area that’s looking to start their career in Marketing, Public Relations or Communications? Tell them about us!  You can send them to our super-duper professional job posting.  Okay. I lied. Nothing with a picture of an evil monkey has ever been considered professional. But that’s just one more reason to want to work for GiveForward. It’s a healthy balance of important work and a light-hearted atmosphere of intelligent individuals who like to goof-off every now and then.

P.S. We race each other around the office on big bouncy balls on a regular basis. Marty usually wins.

Organizers of fundraising pages can now manage how often and what type of notifications are received when fundraisers receive donations or hugs.  You can now opt to receive email updates after each donation, a daily summary with all the donations and hugs from the day, or a weekly summary of all the donations and hugs from the week.  You can opt to receive all three or just the one that is most suitable for your preferences. You will be able to change your option whenever you want, so if you decide that the option you chose was not ideal, you can always go back and switch your notification option.

This option will be available to you under the “Manage This Fundraiser” column in your user dashboard for your fundraising page when you log in to your account.  It will be the last item in the list of options for you to update and edit your fundraising page.

May 4th is World Give Day, the one day of the year that is fully dedicated to giving- whether it’s performing a random act of kindness, donating to a good cause, or taking part in community service. Asking your friends and family to support your GiveForward page is the perfect way to encourage them to participate in World Give Day, especially because of the World Give Day fundraising competition to win an extra $750 for your fundraiser.  But there are many ways to take part in this movement of global giving thanks to small scale acts of generosity. Read about them here.

The GF team is going to be giving out free hugs all day, how are you going to participate in World Give Day?