On the second Friday of First Book Fun...

I should try embedding my rendition of 12 days of christmas parody song for First Book Fridays in here sometimes as it might spice up my somewhat boring posts to this blog. Anyhow, so another week goes by here and "on the second friday of first book fun I did...*drum roll* two celebrity requests for WBGYH campaign.

People here at First Book really enjoy using abbreviations that confounded me for sometimes until I got the courage to ask, "umm...what does that stand for?" So please excuse me if I use some myself in here. Anyhow, it seems that people also like to be out of the office quite often too as I seem to get a lot of out of office replies from people. So last week after I got myself to be quite familiar with Kintera, the database software that we use, it got somewhat more complicated. Apparently you can analyze the database also on excel and I added another set of skills for looking at large amounts of data and inputting specifications to net myself some interesting database points for trying to figure out which states had top donors.

So it seems that First Book's unique proportion of funding may not be so good in the economy as a majority of funding of the organization comes from corporation and the economy does not seem to be favoring large corporations currently. Thus, in the development ends of things we are looking at how to lure in more individual donors and finding foundation grants, which is what I've been busying myself with this week. In times of a rough economy, it seems the foundations have also been affected somewhat as I'm extremely disspointed by several grants that would have worked out perfectly for First Book but they have discontinued taking in applications, or you would have to know someone on their board to apply or your organization would have be a previous applicant.

In terms of individual donation pleas, we're moving into the territories of social media and I have been included on meetings pertaining to this. As with my previous experience with working on starting non-profits, the power of social media can be a very powerful thing and I think First Book is definitely going in the right direction with placing themselves on twitter.