Hello Joyful Heart Community,

Nice to meet all of you! My name is Joanna Colangelo and I’m the Manager of Corporate and Foundation Relations at Joyful Heart. I spend most of my days here raising money through the support of our generous and brilliantly creative corporate partners and through the dedicated individuals who have a deep understanding of our issues and run private, family and community foundations. I’ll be posting periodic entries on our blog to keep you posted on new corporate products we’re launching (who loves the Me&Ro necklaces and philosophy products?!) and new awareness campaigns that we may be collaborating with companies on (I hope you’ve all watched Telling Amy’s Story from the Verizon Foundation: http://telling.psu.edu).

Today, I’m writing about an exciting new initiative that we’ve embarked on for the month of August. As many of you have probably seen through our Facebook posts, we’ve been accepted into a GlobalGiving Open Challenge from August 2 to August 31. GlobalGiving connects thousands of organizations with individual donors who want to support important causes across the world--many who already know about Joyful Heart--and, thousands of other individuals who are just learning about us for the first time through GlobalGiving.

So, what’s an Open Challenge? Open Challenges give organizations one month to raise $4,000 from at least 50 different donors. If we do this, then we get a permanent spot on GlobalGiving--and we can keep fundraising there throughout the year. Our Open Challenge project for August is to raise funds to help us support our efforts and programs to end the backlog of untested rape kits in the United States (www.endthebacklog.org).

There are estimated to be hundreds of thousands of untested rape kits across the country. Each one represents a lost opportunity for healing and justice to a survivor and sends a message to perpetrators that they can get away with their crimes--and that they can continue to rape without penalty or prosecution. When we first learned of the Open Challenge, a team of us got together here and thought about the feasibility of raising $4,000 in one month–it’s a lot of money in a short time. But then we did a little math…

• We have almost 68,000 supporters on Facebook. That means that if every Facebook supporter donated $10, we’d raise $680,000!
• Or, if half of our supporters donated $5, we’d raise almost $340,000.
• Or, if every supporter donated $1, we’d raise close to $68,000.
• Or, if just 200 supporters of our 68,000 gave $20 each, we would meet our goal!

We understand that it isn’t always possible for our Joyful community to support us financially and we would never want anyone to overextend their resources. The good news is that there are still plenty of ways to support this Open Challenge (and our other fundraising efforts) by helping us to spread the word and raise awareness of our cause. In fact, GlobalGiving offers bonus funds for those projects that are the "most shared" on Facebook (meaning, friends are telling friends; people are reposting to their walls and engaging their social networks). Joyful Heart already has 61 shares and the challenge has only just started. You’ll be hearing more from the JHF team on this effort throughout the month. In the meantime, I hope you’ll join me in supporting our GlobalGiving Open Challenge by either donating at: www.globalgiving.org/projects/end-the-backlog-of-untested-rape-kits-us/ or sharing this message with others and encouraging them to pass it on.

With gratitude,

Joanna