The nomination period has ended and we have an amazing set of 20 nonprofit nominees. Read about our last set of nonprofits below and then start voting! You can vote once per day so share it with your friends and return on a daily basis to give your favorite nonprofit some love.

Kraus-Hartig VFW

We have won the Community Service Award as the #1 VFW Post in Minnesota for the 5th year! All of our awesome volunteers give so much of their personal time and knowledge, and, quite often, their personal funds to provide manpower and support for the many programs we carry out in support of military members, their families and veterans of all eras. Our website desperately needs a complete overhaul and we just don’t have the knowledge to do it ourselves. We need a professional website to promote our programs, give veterans more information on issues that are important to them and allow us to get the word out on activities. A new website would allow us to book halls and take deposits online, show pictures of our events and volunteers and possibly sell items online to raise the funds we need to keep going. We’ve been here since 1946 and we want to celebrate in 2046, but we need your help with a new website so we can do that! Thank you!   Vote for them here.

HOPE Coalition

HOPE Coalition serves families in crisis, who are dealing with the most difficult of social problems – domestic violence, sexual assault, child abuse and homelessness. HOPE puts as many of its resources as possible into directly serving clients, so staff time to do things like update the website is extremely limited. Yet, this is not only the way that many families in crisis crisis find HOPE (and hope), but it’s also HOPE’s “face” to the world of its grant funders, donors and supporters. Please help this very worthwhile cause and give hope!   Vote for them here.

Red Wing Marine Museum

New museum located in Red Wing that is telling the story of an industry that is long gone and is educating people of the importance that this company had in the history of Red Wing.   Vote for them here.

MicroGrants

My professional background is both entrepreneurial (for almost 20 years, I ran What Matters, www.what-matters.com, where I used a variety of outside services to create 5 websites over that time span) and corporate (before What Matters, I ran business development for the old Mona Meyer McGrath & Gavin, now part of Weber Shandwick (www.webershandwick.com). Those experiences helped me learn the power of both design and language in website development, as well as how much each of those contribute to telling your story with both logic and emotion. On January 6, 2014, I began a new life, as a non-profit leader. I am passionate about our work, which spurs economic self-sufficiency. Basically, MicroGrants awards strategic grants to low income people of potential. It’s a simple model that produces powerful results. Foundations, families, companies and individuals donate funds, and, Partner Agencies nominate grantees, just at the time they are ready for their next step forward. MicroGrants was founded by one of the Twin Cities most admired non profit leaders, Joe Selvaggio (also the founder of Project for Pride in Living and the One Percent Club). During the last 8 years, we have awarded more than $3,000,000 to people who are in partner agency programs at Women Venture, Twin Cities RISE!, PPL, Summit Academy OIC, Prism, the Jeremiah Program, the African Development Corporation, the Neighborhood Development Center and more. Our work is all about their WORK, and the grants we give help people get work (employment grants, which often include things like paying for licenses, uniforms, technology required by an employer), get to work (imagine a single mother with two kids, one in pre-school, one in grammar school, and a car that doesn’t work. Our grant to her makes it possible for her to get to a job that’s not on the bus line… and, keeps her at work even in the Minnesota snowstorms), or create work (almost half our partner agencies are in the business of building entrepreneurs, including micro businesses). In my opinion, we need a website that engages our very diverse audiences, one that is designed from the view point of potential visitors. We haven’t had the time nor the funding to step back and say: What can we do better? How can we engage those who drop by and keep them coming back for more? Our team is very small: just me, a PT office/program manager and a PT consultant whose experience with professional communications tools and techniques is limited. Although the current site is a word press platform, I sometimews feel that it’s so full of content that it’s hard to really “get” what we do. My goal would be: let’s get to web 2.0 Let’s make sure that whether the person who visits the site is a grantee, a new staff member of a partner agency, a donor or prospective donor, a board member or a journalist, they feel our passion and commitment in working with people and partners who believe that the best way out of poverty is work and, that MicroGrants is working! MicroGrants is, by intent, small and very efficiently run; we do our best every day to focus on giving money out, not spending it. This rescue would be a true gift, and, the impact would spill over into many different areas. Our reach is broad: more than 12 board members, another 15 “advisors”, a Women’s Advisory Group, 20 partner agencies with more than 250 staff and 200+ board members, 600 donors, a prospective donor base of nearly 2500 and more than 3,000 grantees. We want to have a site that helps each of them better share our story and it would be our privilege to work with you in creating that site. I really love online contests, so we will do our very best to spread the word. With many thanks for your cool idea.   Vote for them here.

Bridge 2 Hope

The people behind this website do not have much financial backing but they are doing a great work in Prison Ministry. Check out what’s on their current website. It could use some upgrades.   Vote for them here.