Care2 Impact Prize Nominees

Members of the NTEN community:

We invite you to cast your vote below to help pick this year's winner of the third annual Care2 Impact Prize, which recognizes individuals in the nonprofit sector who have made an outstanding impact on the field of online advocacy, online fundraising or both.

To cast your vote, just scroll down on this page and click on the "plus" sign below the candidate you think should win. Note that you are limited to voting for ONE candidate only.

The winner will receive a cash award of $1,000, plus Care2 will donate an additional $1,000 to their favorite charity. The prize will be awarded on Saturday, April 13th at the Nonprofit Technology Conference (NTC), during the awards luncheon.

The deadline to vote is noon (Pacific Time) on Wednesday, April 10th. Any member of the NTEN community is welcome to vote, but only one vote per person will be counted.

FYI, the five nominees were selected (out of a pool of 20+ nonprofit sector leaders initially considered) by a panel of distinguished judges representing Amnesty International, NTEN, Donor Digital, Engaging Networks and Care2.

The judges considered four main criteria in picking these finalists.

  1. Innovation. Has this person introduced valuable new ideas and approaches to the nonprofit sector?
  2. Influence. Has this person’s work produced a ripple effect to influence and benefit other professionals in the sector?
  3. “Impact Delta.” Is there a quantifiably large difference between the “before” and the “after” of this person’s work – measurable in fundraising dollars, or the quantity and quality of advocacy victories won, or the number of citizens participating in a cause? [Note that a proportionally large impact at a small organization is just as important as a big impact at a large organization.]
  4. Advancing The Cause. Did this person help accomplish something that advanced their cause(s) meaningfully, such as via organizing or winning advocacy victories? Or by providing the funds needed to fuel campaigns that won victories?

Thanks to all of you who participate in the final voting process, to honor the heroes in our midst.

Voting is now closed. The winner will be awarded on Saturday April 13, 2013. Thanks for your participation!

Questions regarding the voting process? Please email us at events@care2team.com. Thanks!

Jamie Biggar

Jamie Biggar is founder and executive director of Leadnow ( www.leadnow.ca ), the Canadian cross-issue advocacy organization built on the MoveOn / 38 Degrees / Avaaz organizing model. Under Biggar’s leadership, the 2-year-old organization has already grown to well over 220,000 members, and has built a record of influencing Canadian politics and legislative change. Biggar has provided vision, rallied many partner organizations, and injected creative strategic direction. Leadnow is currently organizing to encourage cooperation between Canada's progressive political parties to achieve success in the next federal elections. Leadnow combines online and face-to-face organizing. It launched with distributed house-parties to set its direction, and it has organized one of the largest distributed protests in Canadian history to protest dangerous pipeline proposals. From radio ads to funding legal injunctions, Leadnow has also used online fundraising for a wide range of tactics. Biggar’s background is in the youth climate movement and large-scale online and offline collaboration to develop policy and campaigns. 


James Rucker

James Rucker is co-founder of Color of Change, one of the largest and most well known action platforms empowering the African American community. He grew it from scratch to more than 800,000 members, focused on elevating black American voices. In 2008, Color of Change mobilized more than 300,000 people, and raised more than $250,000, around the “Jena 6” case in Louisiana, marking the first major online/offline mobilization of African Americans and their allies in decades. In 2009, the organization mobilized 300,000 people to get Glenn Beck off of Fox News after he called President Obama a racist who hates white people. The organization prompted more than 100 advertisers to leave Beck’s show, making it the first successful “advertiser pullout” campaign in recent history and the first to use the Internet. In 2011, the organization led an ultimately unsuccessful campaign to stop the execution of Troy Davis in Georgia. In a series of campaigns on Net Neutrality, Color of Change succeeded at exposing the connection between corporate money and the position of civil rights groups and black members of the U.S. Congress on key issues. These campaigns featured nearly 60,000 filings from Color of Change members to the FCC, as well as a major public fight with corporate backed organizations and black members of Congress.  Before founding Color of Change, Rucker worked at MoveOn.org, and after he left Color of Change he co-founded Citizen Engagement Laboratory, which has helped support and start nearly a dozen digital advocacy organizations. Rucker remains chairman of CEL’s board, as well as chairman of the board of Color of Change. Rucker remains chairman of CEL’s board, as well as chairman of the board of Color of Change.


Debra Rosen

Debra Rosen is the Movement Director at Walk-Free. During her career she has made a significant impact on such causes as labor rights, human rights, LGBT equality, senior citizen advocacy, reproductive health and tobacco control. For nearly eight years she was a consultant at M+R Strategic Services, where she worked on behalf of over 30 nonprofit organizations including AARP, HRC, AFGE, Tobacco Free Kids, UFW and many more. Then Rosen went on to consult on the creation of the new international anti-slavery movement, www.WalkFree.org, which is currently based in Australia. Recently, Rosen signed on to join her client organization, Walk Free, full-time and has relocated to Australia to be closer to some of the countries most impacted by modern slavery.  Walk Free is testing new online advocacy actions to encourage activists to engage in reaching targets on social media - http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=nIJi1wUsUIo   In her role, Rosen has grown Walk Free's social media presence to nearly 1 million people, and the group's base of email supporters to more than 350,000 people. She is most proud of the Campaigns team she has worked to build in Australia, and their hard work to identify excellent campaign opportunities and rapidly build the movement to end modern slavery.


Paull Young and Scott Harrison (joint nomination) from charity: water

charity: water, which was founded by Scott Harrison (right side photo) in 2006, is a shining example of using the Internet innovatively to engage and inspire its legions of supporters and donors. Under Harrison’s leadership, along with that of Digital Director Paull Young (left side photo), the organization has systematically improved upon or reinvented many traditional nonprofit fundraising models, with stunning results. Last year alone, charity: water raised $27 million, with a staff of fewer than 50 people. More significantly, charity: water has completed 7,000 projects in 20 countries, helping to bring clean water to more than 2.5 million people. The organization practices extreme fiscal transparency. By creating a separate overhead funding stream from almost 200 major donors (who are collectively called “The Well”), charity: water is able to tell its tens of thousands of small dollar donors honestly and powerfully that 100 percent of their donations are spent on water projects. charity: water also has excelled at providing direct feedback to even its smallest donors, who receive GPS coordinates to locate on Google Maps the specific wells that have been drilled using their donations. Donors also receive photos and dispatches from the field, reporting on the wells’ progress and including feedback from the people who benefit from the water. charity: water is a leader at inspiring and empowering peer-to-peer fundraising – especially using video. This P2P prowess is evident in the fact that more than 20,000 people have held birthday campaigns to raise funds for charity: water -- creating videos, email messages and Facebook posts that have generated many millions of dollars for the cause. And charity: water is a powerhouse at using social media to build awareness and a sense of community; the organization has 1.4 million Twitter followers. In 2012 Scott Harrison gave a speech to the Association of Fundraising Professionals’ annual conference in which he said that the work that he (and Paull Young and their other colleagues) are doing is nothing short of an attempt to “reinvent charity fundraising” entirely.


Shumway Marshall

Shumway Marshall is the online director at the American Foundation for Equal Rights (AFER), the sole organizational sponsor of the court case challenging California’s Proposition 8, which eliminated the ability for gay and lesbian couples to marry in California. The case is now being considered by the U.S. Supreme Court. At AFER, Shumway has created online strategies to educate and motivate people around the issue of marriage equality and every phase of the court case. To educate the public about the facts about marriage equality, AFER live-streamed the Los Angeles premiere of the play “8,”a first by any nonprofit on YouTube. Shumway’s strategies around the performance, which starred George Clooney and Brad Pitt, resulted in 212,000 viewers and 4,500 mentions on Twitter in a single night.  Prior to AFER, Shumway headed online efforts at Equality California, the state’s largest LGBT advocacy organization. There, his efforts helped pass more than 50 laws for the LGBT community, including domestic partner rights, the nation’s first Harvey Milk Day, and gender identity protections. During the “No on Proposition 8” campaign, Shumway helped raise more than $20 million online in the month before Election Day.  A native of New Hampshire who now lives in Los Angeles, Shumway serves on the Board of Governors of Occidental College and chairs the communication committee of the Village Green, a U.S. Historic Landmark. He also is a board member of the Scott Hitt Foundation, which grants intern scholarships to organizations dedicated to achieving LGBT equality.