Contributors flooded the Colorado Gives Day online charity blitz with nearly $12 million by the time donations closed at noon Wednesday, up from $8.4 million collected last year.
The gush of end-of-year giving may have been helped along by a series of server crashes that kept donors from making their gifts to nonprofits through the GivingFirst.org website Tuesday morning, organizers said.
Some groups eventually began taking donations directly, and at 2 p.m., sponsor Community First Foundation announced that online giving would be extended by 12 hours.
“The nonprofits used it to their advantage, spun it, talked very well about it. They said, ‘We’ve got this extra time, let’s see how much more we can raise,’ ” said Dana Rinderknecht, the GivingFirst.org manager for Community First Foundation.
And it worked well for many of the nonprofits participating in the second Colorado Gives Day, a 24-hour drive designed to spike giving. The Colorado event is among a handful nationwide.
Rinderknecht said 927 of 932 participating organizations netted contributions.
Among the big winners: Habitat for Humanity of Metro Denver drew enough to build a house; Food Bank of the Rockies can distribute more than 780,000 meals; and Rocky Mountain PBS more than doubled its original goal.
One as yet unnamed charity received a $500,000 contribution. The most common amount was $50, but $100 donations ranked a close second — and those two amounts accounted for about half the gifts.
As a direct result of the technical problems, The Center — which provides support and advocacy for Colorado’s gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender population — attracted an offer of matching funds.
A final accounting will be available by the end of the month.
Some nonprofit organizations, such as Denver’s Museum of Contemporary Art, saw no increase in total dollars over last year but did see a significant rise in the number of donors in spite of the technical glitch.
“We were very proactive,” said development director Scott Anderson. “We noticed that the system slowed down dramatically in the early morning hours, and we communicated that to donors.”
By the time the online giving ended, MCA had logged a 40 percent increase in donors, whose contact information will provide it with a broader base for future fundraising. Anderson also said that for an online campaign, there was an unusual number of repeat donors.
“It’s becoming a growing part of our end-of-year fundraising,” he said, adding that Colorado Gives Day accounted for about half of MCA’s December contributions.
Denver’s Clínica Tepeyac, which provides health care to the medically underserved, estimated that this year’s total would be slightly higher than last year’s — partly because of more media exposure.
But development director Sally Reed also figured that the added attention brought on by the computer glitch made more people aware that they could donate online.
“The exciting thing for me is it’s more donors who gave that way,” she said. “We had a small overall number of donations but many of these were from patients. That the working-class poor that we serve would step up and make donations, that was nice. It’s going to be relatively small compared to some other organizations, but it’ll be very exciting to set some goals to double that next year.”
Kevin Simpson: 303-954-1739 or ksimpson@denverpost.com
