The Community Foundation of the New River Valley (CFNRV) is holding its 8th Annual Giving Day, GiveLocalNRV on Wednesday, June 23, 2021, to help organizations both big and small raise money in the New River Valley. The Annual Online Giving Day began in 2014 in honor of the CFNRV’s twentieth anniversary. It aims to encourage charitable giving and to draw attention to the many nonprofit organizations serving our region. Since its inception, GiveLocalNRV has helped NRV nonprofits raise over $1.6 million, and this year the CFNRV hopes to raise over $430,000 across the more than 90 participating organizations.
Donors can visit the website –givelocalnrv.org– to make a secure, online gift to their favorite nonprofit organization and help that organization secure grants and prizes from the CFNRV. Leaderboards showing the overall totals and how individual organizations are doing will be posted on June 23rd, but donors don’t have to wait to support their preferred organizations. Any gift made between June 1st and June 23rd will count toward the giving day total! The donation can be as small as $5 or as large as your pocketbook can imagine.
GiveLocalNRV has long been an important tool for area nonprofits, but it has been essential to many organizations during the COVID-19 pandemic when in-person fundraisers were canceled or moved online. The nonprofits in the New River Valley have been resilient throughout the pandemic and have provided critical support to community members who needed it the most. GiveLocalNRV provides a great opportunity for community members to show their appreciation for these organizations and engage in some friendly competition to grow charitable giving.
In 2020, the Boy Scouts of America Blue Ridge Mountain Council utilized the GiveLocalNRV platform to raise over $60,000 by taking advantage of the “teams” feature. Each pack could raise money through a page customized for their members and supporters. Kenneth Lyons, Chief Development Officer with BSA, Blue Ridge Mountain Council stated “In 2020 with our summer camps closed we created a camp Olympics as a competition to raise money to support the Boy Scout Program. Following some of the best methods recommended by the CFNRV we were able to engage new donors. 65% of our donors were new supporters, and it reached a demographic of donors we had not been previously able to recruit.” The Boy Scouts also won a $500 power hour grant from the CFNRV in 2020.
With the help of corporate sponsors, the CFNRV will award $15,000 in grants and prizes during GiveLocalNRV to further incentivize giving. Grants will be given to organizations that raise the most money, have the greatest number of unique donors overall, and during designated power hours, produce a GiveLocalNRV video for social media, and more. For more information about the giving day, grants and prizes, and participating organizations, visit givelocalnrv.org.