Posted in: news
19th January 2015
In 2013 the Huffington Post asked the question “What if, in the midst of our country's ongoing jobs crisis, we could tap into the job-creating potential of non-profits”? The discussions that followed led to the launch of the JobRaising Challenge.
The JobRaising Challenge aimed to find and then fund the most creative, interesting and innovative ideas that non-profits had come up with to create jobs in the United States; from broad missions to close the skills gap and provide training to specific services, to ideas like providing suits for job interviews to those who could not otherwise afford them.
The Huffington Post partnered with the Skoll Foundation, CrowdRise and McKinsey & Company to drive the project.
By utilizing the crowd-funding website CrowdRise, Huffington Post and their partners raised over $US 1.5 million, for 217 organizations in 31 states and 110 cities. But these numbers only tell half of the story. Although raising money was the ultimate goal, sparking debate and engaging the public was also a large part of HuffPost's strategy. During the campaign, over 200 blogs from participating organizations were published on the Huffington Post, and the number of donations made, rather than the amount of money raised, suggests that crafting a positive story around the initiative made all of the difference in raising awareness with the public.
While the overall amount of money raised was $US 1.5 million, most of the donations made were between $5 and $10, and 80% of donations were less than $100. In other words, Huffpost had managed to engage tens of thousands of Americans with their cause, and this increased awareness was fundamental to keeping the momentum rolling and ultimately making the campaign the huge success that it was.
Read more about the Huffington Post's JobRaising initiative here.