Barrel of Monkeys: Chase Community Giving Winner

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.

The Chase Community Giving competition worked by holding open voting via their Facebook page. The top 200 nonprofits each won a grant of $20,000. Submitting nonprofits encouraged voting through social media, creating videos related to their cause, website marketing and many other creative tactics.

Most recently, an Advisory Board at Chase Community Giving selected 17 final winning charities across the country to share $500,000. Barrel of Monkeys was one of the recipients of this additional grant.

Social Media Voting Tips

We chatted with Barrel of Monkeys Executive Director, Amanda Farrar, about tips and techniques that were successful in driving social media voting. “Driving the votes was extremely difficult and a lot of work. As we were among 15 local theaters in Chicago to receive a grant in the first round of funding, many of the same people were being asked every minute of every day to vote for local theaters! In the end, this helped us all as we were able to trade votes and work together to stay in the top 200,” she shares.

Saying Thank You

To combat the feeling of being a nuisance at least somewhat, Amanda adds that Barrel of Monkeys changed their message from, “Vote! Help us get money!” to “THANK YOU for your vote! You are helping us save the world!” Barrel of Monkeys created thank you videos for the prior week of voting. “Every day, we published a video that gave an updated vote tally and thanked everyone who had voted in our own unique way,” says Amanda.

Amanda’s advice for others who are attempting to be successful in this kind of granting process is “be ready for a lot of work, a lot of calling in favors, and with some strategies that you know will motivate your supporters!”

Congratulations to a great group of folks at Barrel of Monkeys and a creative, fun cause. Check out Barrel of Monkeys any Monday night at 8pm for their ever-changing weekly showcase, “That’s Weird Grandma.”

See our other articles this month in our blog series about innovative fundraising and social media charitable marketing:

• Five Ways to Use Social Media for Fundraising
• Grant for Good: A Year’s Worth of Services
• Lessons from the Climate Ride: Driving Social Donations
• and even our 10 Tips for maximizing your Twitter account can’t hurt with your cause-funding and social media efforts.

Are you using social media or other digital marketing resources in successful nonprofit or cause-related efforts? We’d like to hear about it!