'Tis the Season: The 2009 Give!Guide is Live

November 13, 2009

PORTLAND, OR – (November 13, 2009) For the fourth year in a row, OakTree Digital and the Willamette Week have partnered to deliver an online giving website that benefits local non-profits during the 2009 holiday season. Despite this year being one of the worst recessionary periods in memory, expectations remain high for online giving. Last year's Give!Guide collected more than $800,000 for 55 nonprofits; this year, the goal is to exceed $1M. This year's Give!Guide features 79 non-profits, presented in eight categories, like Arts, Environment, Social Action, etc.

Since 2006, OakTree has sought to use the latest technology to improve the online giving experience for donors. This year is no exception, and indeed, the 2009 Give!Guide represents an impressive donation platform, unique in its slick design and robust feature-set. In recent years, the database-driven, real-time Flash charts have presented donors with a "horse race" view of donations--by demographic information, nonprofit category, etc. This year, this popular feature has been enhanced to provide donors with "widgets" that enable donors to grab a chart of their choice, sharing with social media services or embedding on blogs and websites. The widget feature is off to an exciting start: within the first 24 hours of launch, over 5,000 views were recorded.

This year brought another technological innovation, in migrating the Give!Guide platform into the Sitefinity Community Edition CMS. OakTree has years of experience in building client websites on the Sitefinity platform, so the Community Edition made sense for the Give!Guide.

"Sitefinity Community Edition was a logical fit for the Give!Guide because it has great features, but also has an open architecture, which we needed for some custom features," said John Schmitt, OakTree's President. "For the Willamette Week team, Sitefinity is great because they can make easy page changes, or blog when they want to broadcast an update quickly."

The Give!Guide also has a tradition of honoring four Skidmore Award winners, chosen for their tireless efforts for the local nonprofits they represent. The winners are all Portlanders under the age of 35, selected through an interview process facilitated by the dedicated staff of Willamette Week.

Over the past six years, the Give!Guide has quickly became a popular and well-recognized charitable event for its wide appeal to a variety of local non-profits in the Portland metro area. We encourage you to donate to the Give!Guide.

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