Clean Food, Extreme Beer, Awesome Holiday.

As book lovers and storytellers as well as foodies and beer geeks, what better opportunity to put our favorite pastimes to the test than Thanksgiving?

Tim’s been in the north country this week working on Mightybytes site content and cooking up dishes like Wild Rice with Lemon, Fennel and Dried Plums and Red Lentil Soup with Turnip and Parsley from Terry Walters’ new cookbook Clean Start while James and Steve were busy bottling the second of three holiday batches of Mightybrew sourced from Dogfish Head brewmaster Sam Calagione’s book Extreme Brewing.

Social sites offer great tools for cultivating donor relationships, but you may need to tweak your approach a bit.

I recently embarked on a 320 mile bike ride through the California wilderness to raise money and awareness for the climate crisis. The Climate Ride experience was exhilarating, educational, and I would definitely recommend it to anyone interested in challenging themselves and doing good work for a great cause. It was the fourth ride of this kind—long distance road touring in the name of a good cause—that I have done, but the first in which I used social media almost exclusively for my fundraising efforts. I found social fundraising to be a quick and effective way to meet, and eventually exceed my goals, but discovered that it requires a somewhat different approach than your standard plea for donations.

Chicago's Barrel of Monkeys is a winning nonprofit in the Chase Community Giving competition, receiving 1,615 votes. This will go a long way to help a group which we personally know is a great cause. Congrats!

Our resident interface and user experience whiz Tai Palmgren is a member of Barrel of Monkeys, a local nonprofit that offers an alternative environment for children and creativity. Barrel of Monkeys teaches creative writing workshops in Chicago Public Schools. These actor-educators adapt the stories and poems written by the students into sketches and songs, and perform them in a show for the school. We profiled Tai about working with BOM and the ‘Art of Theater for Education’ in last year’s Chicago Artists Month series, talking specifically about creative process.

Big Brands and large Trusts aren’t the only ones funding cause-driven projects these days.

Pepsi’s Refresh Everything and Chase Community Giving are getting all the press, but small businesses can make big differences as well, which is truly admirable in such a challenging economy. Fellow Chicagoans Firebelly Design have been offering their annual Grant for Good, donating a year’s worth of strategy, branding and design services to a lucky non-profit, for years now.

With the recent success of so many cause-driven crowdfunding campaigns for good causes (think Pepsi’s Refresh Everything or Chase Community Giving), non-profits, arts organizations and other institutions are flocking to social networks in droves, hoping to cash in on current corporate social responsibility trends.

Tim just had firsthand experience using social media for fundraising via his fundraising efforts for the Climate Ride and Barrel of Monkeys, a Chicago theater and education company that features Tai of Mightybytes as a member, just received two grants thanks to their efforts with Chase Community Giving. In that spirit, we thought we would share a handful of tips for maximizing your social media fundraising efforts.