Oswaldo shows off some of the tomatoes he has grown with assistance from the Coordinadora's sustainable agriculture program. Photo by Jose "Chencho" Alas

The poet Henry Adams asked, “What do we plant when we plant a tree?” To a small nonprofit organization focused on impacting environmental, economic, and social change in rural Central America, the act of planting trees is an act of hope.

The Foundation for Self-Sufficiency in Central America (FSSCA) is a Texas-based grassroots organization that partners with low-income communities in Central America organized to achieve environmental sustainability, economic self-sufficiency, and social change.

In September 2004, FSSCA launched the Romero Memorial Tree Project. This project set out to organize delegations from North America to plant 50,000 trees in deforested lands in El Salvador. Year 1 of the project aimed to plant 2,000 trees. To make this goal in time for the first delegation scheduled for March 2005, FSSCA needed to fundraise $10 per tree, or $20,000 total, in just a few months.

In order to create awareness of this new program and raise funds quickly, Assistant Director Sean Hale looked for new methods to fundraise. “There was not enough time or budget for a full individual donor campaign or to apply for grant monies,” said Sean, “We have lots of supporters that want to help us raise money. My instinct was to turn to the Internet to try to find new ways to involve our existing supporters to raise these funds.”

After a search on Google, Sean discovered Firstgiving (http://www.firstgiving.com), a web-based service that allows individuals to set-up personal web pages to help raise funds for the nonprofit of their choice. Through Firstgiving, Sean was able to quickly set-up a fundraising start page promoting the tree-planting project. He then sent a link to the start page to FSSCA’s supporters, inviting them to create their own online fundraising pages to support the project.

“What happened next was magical,” Sean reflected, “Over the next few months, five of our supporters created online fundraising pages and emailed the link to their own social networks, asking them to donate $10 per tree. As a result, $10,000 was raised by just a handful of supporters.”

Typically, organizations adding an online personal fundraising component to their fundraising efforts realize larger and more gifts. Funds raised through online personal fundraising services are processed and added to the charity's bank account automatically.

“Online personal fundraising has allowed us to open up a new area of fundraising,” Sean said, “This technology has made it easy for us and our supporters to help out in a meaningful, personal, and efficient way.”

By employing online personal fundraising methods to raise money for future delegations, Sean believes that FSSCA will make their goal of 50,000 within the next five years.

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Examples of some of the online fundraising pages created by FSSCA supporters can be found at:
http://www.firstgiving.com/Chencho
http://www.firstgiving.com/Gracefamily