Last year, we made significant strides in actively matching offers that come through the giving network with worthy causes. We have also grown our community connections in remote areas and are steadfast in pursuing our outreach activities with an initial focus on targeting isolated community-based organisations working in the country’s key poverty nodes. To support this, we are investigating offline mechanisms – like SMS messaging – to help causes more easily access our services. Our giving campaigns continued to increase their reach and received significant support last year.

Donate-a-Book

Donate-a-Book 2008 promoted literacy and the joy of reading in communities without access to books. It was an opportunity for book lovers to donate South African storybooks to pre-schools and early childhood development centres.

The campaign captured the nation’s imagination in April 2008, with an impressive R80,000 raised for ten under-resourced early learning centres in South Africa. Generous individuals with a love of reading, together with Media24 and Exclusive Books, helped us to meet our target by 31 July 2008.

Early learning centres from every province in South Africa received 100 brand-new, mother-tongue story books (in eight of the official languages) in a lockable trunk, as well as resource materials and follow-up support for the teachers.

The books were selected by our Donate-a-Book partner, Biblionef – a non-profit book publisher that provides storybooks in all 11 official South African languages to children's organisations throughout the country. Biblionef focuses on African stories with good illustrations, that children can easily relate to.

Moving forward, the Donate-a-Book campaign will be incorporated within SASIX and Gifts4Good to support our goals of ensuring a primary education for all and increasing literacy levels across the country.

Beneficiary early learning centres:
• Buhlebuyeza Creche, KwaZulu-Natal
• Ebenezer ECD Centre, Mpumalanga
• Fundani Nathi Day Care, North West
• Home Pride in Tshiawelo, Gauteng
• Iketsetseng and Mothoosele Preschools, Free State
• Ilitha Creche, Western Cape
• Lingelethu Pre-school, Eastern Cape
• Masungulu Educare Centre, Limpopo
• Vaalrivier ECD Site, Northern Cape

Gifts4Good

Gifts4Good is an alternative gifting website that makes supporting good causes easy, but effective. Our online ‘shop’ offers innovative gifts, like fruit trees for a community orchard or a birth certificate for an orphaned child. By buying one of these gifts, donors invest in a critical development sector in South Africa.

The funds raised from gifts are transferred to SASIX-assessed projects which focus on providing these and similar items as part of their solution to the problems faced in South Africa. This way, users of Gifts4Good can rest assured that their money is going towards effective, sustainable solutions.

In 2008-09, Gifts4Good raised R122,350 for high-impact projects in key development sectors, an increase of 300% on the total raised in 2007-08. Last year, we focused on communicating the Gifts4Good message of alternative gifts for any occasion: Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, birthdays, weddings or bar mitzvahs. We now have 181 registered donors (almost triple last year’s number) and are confident this figure will continue to grow substantially in the year ahead.

gifts4good.co.za

"This donation will have a positive impact on the children’s education and future careers. We are looking forward to helping more children. " – Petros Myeza, Project Director of Ikhulubone Trust

Projects ranged from painting a school in Dobsonville to clearing alien vegetation at an animal welfare society in Cape Town. In our post event survey we received significant positive feedback from the volunteers – all volunteers who completed the survey indicated that they would participate again and support the causes they had worked with in the future.

doitday.co.za

Make Christmas Matter

Make Christmas Matter offers a range of alternative Christmas gifts to help people make a difference over the giving season each year. The campaign runs from November to January and gives South Africans the opportunity to discover the joy of giving with gifts like a food parcel for a hungry child or professional training for a healthcare worker.

Hundreds of people and companies broke the mould over the last festive season by buying R317,710 worth of alternative gifts through makechristmasmatter.co.za. Make Christmas Matter was sponsored once again by the Cadiz Foundation, who themselves bought R50,000 worth of alternative gift vouchers for their clients and staff, establishing for each of them a personal online Giving Foundation.The campaign received unprecedented support from the media, generating more than R3 million in PR coverage.

We were also very lucky to have celebrated Franschhoek chef, Reuben Riffel, create a special Christmas cookie recipe for the campaign, while photography studio Lightworks, also in Franschhoek, took the photographs for free. This added a positive celebrity endorsement to the campaign and helped with publicity. It also allowed for the creation of a ‘viral’ marketing component, as we sent out email versions of the recipe.

Five development sectors were chosen for the 2008 Make Christmas Matter campaign: boosting basic healthcare, caring for children, generating livelihoods, improving education and supporting animal protection. The funds raised from gifts were allocated to SASIX projects in these sectors, which are now being implemented.

makechristmasmatter.co.za

Teachers Dream

Teachers Dream, launched by Minister of Education, Naledi Pandor in 2005, helps South African teachers bring learning to life. Experiential learning is a vital part of outcomes-based education, but many under-resourced schools can’t afford to organise outings or inspiring classroom activities. Teachers Dream encourages teachers to plan, submit, carry out and report on dream lessons, funded through the Teachers Dream website.

In 2008-09, Teachers Dream achieved 29 fully funded dreams and listed a further 10 for funding. We presented to 35 schools (in regions that we had not visited before), met with 29 principals and heads of department and connected with nearly 300 schools as part of the campaign. Through the presentations and our partnerships with LEAP Science and Maths School, the Primary Science Programme (PSP) and the Association for Educational Transformation (ASSET), which helped us to reach more teachers, more effectively, the Teachers Dream campaign reached 560 schools: some 3,050 teachers and 50,029 learners.

GreaterGood SA developed Teachers Dream as a public benefit service to give teachers access to the funds they need to bring learning to life in and out of the classroom. The programme expanded in 2008 to include an educator development training programme for teachers, focusing on understanding outcomes-based education, defining a lesson plan and sourcing training materials and resources. However, teachers are still struggling to get to grips with planning appropriate dream lessons and we continue to identify the best course of action to support this teacher capacity enhancement.

teachersdream.co.za