Friendship Circle Races to $1M - But Won't Campaign on Shabbat

Many of you may have heard of the Chase Community Giving competition that's been running for several weeks, in which non-profits compete (relying heavily on social media outreach) to win a million dollars . Only 100 non-profits made it to the $1M round, and only one of those is a Jewish non-profit: The Friendship Circle, a Detroit-based charity that helps special needs children and families and people recovering from addictions. (Voting for Chase Giving starts the 12:01 AM EST on 15th (tonight) and ends the 22nd - vote for them here.)

My friend Leah Jones, founder of Natiiv Arts & Media and all-around awesome blogger/social media guru/person is working with the Friendship Circle, and she informed me that "Friendship Circle is losing 30 hours of campaigning because of Shabbat, so we're really trying to make every call/email/tweet that we can to get the word out."

Leah also called my attention to this statement:

You may notice that in North America we are not campaigning on Friday night or Saturday during the day, it’s not because a million dollars is not important to us, it’s because we believe there is something even more more important to us, our Sabbath day. We realize we will lose 30hrs of campaign time as the contests stretch over two Shabbats, but know we will be provided for.

Leah also shared five ways people - especially those of you who are not Shomrei Shabbat (Shabbat observant) can help:

1. Vote for Friendship Circle on Facebook, all of the info is at http://votefc.com (Hey, I did that! - Management)

2. If you vote, please tweet about your vote for FC! Use http://votefc.com and #votefc hashtag! Do this as many times as you’d like, the Chasegiving contest runs for 7 days, and we think it’d be great to trade a million #voteFC tweets for a million dollars! (Hey, I did that! - Management)

3. For badges and easy tweeting, check our resource page at http://votefc.com/promote/ 

4. Write a blog post about Friendship Circle and our race to a million dollars on your blog. (Hey, I did that! - Management)

 5. On Saturday the 16th we have a big surprise happening at the Pistons/Knicks game at halftime (around 8pm), we’d like to make a lot of noise on twitter about it, so much so that we could possibly TREND in the top ten. We’d love for you to help with that. All you have to do is add the #votefc hashtags to your tweets while you watch the game!

Comments

[avraham Berkowitz]

Thanks for Sharing this.
This is a great organization helping thousands of kids with special needs.
Rabbi Avraham Berkowitz

[Leah]

Thanks so much for this post - things are going great, but we're gonna need a lot of clicks to win this thing.