The pleas began rolling in May 14. "Have you heard the BIG news?" went one. Two days later, "I'm not going to bug [you] everyday, but ...."
It seems some small nonprofits and their minions are angling for votes in a $25,000 online contest. The insurance behemoth State Farm is giving away 40 such awards to select charities and good will efforts around the country. (Not all are registered nonprofits.)
It's called the State Farm Neighborhood Assist grants, and it's all on Facebook. (Type the name into a search box and you'll see it.)
Exactly 200 groups are working to get people to go to Facebook to vote so they will be a Top 40 finisher. Ostensibly, State Farm would like unaffiliated voters to visit and vote based on individual appeals, but in truth hardly anyone does this. Why do I say that? (I can't possibly know voters' motivations.) Because the appeals are dry, don't feature video or any kind of "pitch." Because, unless you're looking for some trigger, like "children" or "veteran" or "hungry," there are too many good efforts and like efforts to feel voter satisfaction.
In Arkansas, there are 14, from United Cerebral Palsy in Fayetteville and a group in Texarkana hoping to build a handicapped-accessible area in Jefferson Park, to a Batesville group that pledges "to create a city where the homeless, hungry and impoverished are acknowledged and supported by a united community."
What are the chances a little ol' Arkansas cause will break the Top 40 nationally? Then I remembered Kris Allen. Then I clicked on California and New York and saw that they have just 10 and five causes, respectively.
"58th place! Moving up!" Dayna Hilton wrote Tuesday. She's the director of the Keep Kids Fire Safe Foundation.
"If everyone votes today, I'll bring cookies tomorrow," wrote a co-worker who's pushing El Zocalo, which offers English as a Second Language classes and legal help to mostly Hispanic immigrants and operates a food pantry inside Geyer Springs United Methodist Church.
State Farm smartly offers a "leaderboard" by which you can follow your cause. Again, this is only on Facebook.
As of May 21, the only Arkansas group in the Top 40 was the Percy and Donna Malone Child Safety Center in Arkadelphia, which was sitting at No. 32. As of press time, the center had dropped to No. 33, and Soldier On Service Dogs out of Fayetteville had leapfrogged to No. 30.
I wonder if the charity directors are watching the leaderboard like we were?
"Yes, it's terrible! I have to check it all the time. We're 65 right now, but we moved up from 89 in the last four days!," Sara Mullally told me several days ago. (They were at 69th on Friday.)
Mullally founded El Zocalo resource center for immigrants about four years ago. (El Zocalo means "town square" in Spanish, and "immigrants" here means largely -- but not exclusively -- Spanish speakers.) This is the third year she has tried to get El Zocalo in this thing. If she wins, this single grant will exceed the charity's entire expenses for 2014. With it it'll hire its first executive director.
You must have a Facebook account to vote, and you get 10 votes each day. The contest began May 14, which means Mullally has cast 170 votes for El Zocalo.
You know who else has voted that many times? Amanda Laboy. Not for El Zocalo but for A-Camp Inc. Remember that one? It's the summer camp for kids with autism that won the big pot in the small nonprofit category of the Arkansas Community Foundation's Arkansas Gives Day in April. A-Camp is another charity with a five-figure budget. It marshalled one heckuva push April 2, and it's going back to that network. On May 22, it was No. 48. It has slipped a few spots since then.
If in fact the competition is a random sampling of causes, then this one says something very interesting about our state. Out of 200 finalists, 14 are Arkansan, a number statistically outsized for a population our size.
YOUTH ADVISORY BOARD
As you might expect, there were many more than 200 causes that wanted a crack at the scratch. In fact, the foundation bankrolling the competition capped entrants at 4,000. The 1-in-20 that made it to the popularity contest were handpicked by the State Farm Youth Advisory Board.
Who's that? Each year, 15 people roughly 17-20 years old are appointed to the board for a two-year term. So there are 30, and you might imagine, this is a future Fulbright scholar/beauty pageant crowd -- whence our representative, University of Arkansas sophomore Raygan Sylvester of North Little Rock, comes. She's the reigning Arkansas International Junior Miss.
Sylvester told me she keyed on efforts that were novel and needed. That is, something new and innovative, even "completely off-the-wall ideas," but also sustainable, addressing "a real unmet need in their communities."
Sylvester's a supply chain management major, so gaps in the flow are something she just wants fixed. But she also has a heart, and it can be tugged.
That, I suspect, helps to explain the two Arkansas front-runners. Child Safety Center, for instance, has everything. Child -- our most vulnerable and beloved class of causes. Safety -- we get behind safety even when it isn't children we're trying to keep safe. Center -- this implies a physical presence, which is always easier to sell than a concept (education) or something abstract (a work of art).
"We've been annoying everyone," says Christa Neal, the director.
There are more than a dozen such centers around Arkansas. These are places children arrive at, sometimes in a police cruiser, when one or both of their parents (or another guardian) is accused of abuse or neglect. There's a forensic process that begins and involves interviewing the child. These centers are kind of waystations between an abusive home and a shelter or guardian-foster home. They also institute best practices for a police investigation and subsequent prosecution.
Incidentally, the center is new first lady Susan Hutchinson's favorite cause.
Neal's center is brand new. Its budget is between $100,000 and $200,000.
"We just had our grand opening a few weeks ago, so I think our community is still just really excited about this," she said, but also local law enforcement has been encouraging votes, "and then I'll see many people come on there that I've never even interacted with who'll say, 'I'm sharing this and I'm also voting!' I think it's just networking. ... And my husband's been doing some very amusing memes on Facebook, memes of our daughter saying funny things ... and I'm texting reminders to about 70 people every evening."
That's how it's done. It seems like such a small sacrifice -- a free vote for a potential $25,000 payoff. It takes networking and messaging and hope and -- to be the 40th vote-getter and not the 41st -- a long list of lucky breaks.
Give me what-for at:
bampezzan@arkansasonline.com
High Profile on 05/31/2015