Vote For F.I.R.S.T.

Hey CD,

I was checking the F.I.R.S.T. site and I came across this article. I didn’t see a thread up.

http://usfirst.org/aboutus/content.aspx?id=17297

Directly Copied from the F.I.R.S.T. site.

Vote for FIRST

There are currently two exciting opportunities to show your support for FIRST, but we need your help and the help of all your friends, family and other members of the extended FIRST family/community to make these potential contributions a reality!

  1. Get Out the Vote for FIRST!

FIRST could receive $200,000 from American Express through Members Project. We are thrilled to announce that FIRST has been chosen from among 50 non-profits who applied and is participating in Members Project, the pioneering corporate social responsibility effort from American Express and TakePart. Every three months, participants will vote to help decide the recipient of a $200,000 donation.

What’s more, this effort goes beyond corporate giving. (Although we like that part a lot!) American Express has partnered with TakePart.com, the content-driven social action network of Participant Media, the social change-oriented media company.

After voting for FIRST, TakePart.com’s social advocacy platform will allow you to connect with other like-minded participants online and find additional STEM-related opportunities, among other issues, in your community. It’s corporate responsibility 2.0 in action.

Of course, if FIRST were to garner enough votes to win the $200,000 grant, it would help tremendously.

So thank you American Express and TakePart.com!

VOTE NOW

Once on the Homepage - go to the VOTE section. (Make sure you go to the Education category and find FIRST - you will need to do a simple one-time sign on to allow you to vote each week)

Please vote early and often! You can cast a vote for FIRST - once a week until August 22, 2010!

This round of voting began Monday, May 31, 2010 and ends at 11:59pm Pacific on Sunday, August 22, 2010. Winners for this round of voting will be announced on/around Monday, August 30, 2010.
FIRST is included in the Education category of organizations.
Please consider sending this email and/or the link along to the various FIRST communities you know or use Tweet, LinkedIn, Facebook etc. to help FIRST garner the most number of votes needed by August.

  1. $9,000 ways to celebrate innovation with Pitney Bowes

To mark Pitney Bowes’ 90th birthday this year, the company is donating $9,000 to one of three charities that foster innovation through education.

Please help FIRST win this grant and leverage this opportunity to raise awareness about our good works. Help spread the message to your friends and colleagues via e-mail, Twitter, Facebook and other social networking tools that you use.

VOTE NOW

Votes must be submitted by 10:00 EDT on June 9th.

Thank you for your support of FIRST.

Thank you so much for sharing that! Team 1023 will be busy voting all summer :smiley:

Unfortunately, the voting is only open to people 18 years of age or older…

Yeah I saw that :frowning: but it’s only for the first one! The second one doesn’t have an age minimum.

Links to voting locations:

AmEx / TakePart.com : http://www.takepart.com/membersproject/vote

Pitney Bowes: http://www.pbconnect.com/innovate/

C’mon guys…

FIRST is leading the Pitney with 954-947-1!
FIRST has 17% of the votes and the others have have around 29%, including one with 59%!

Making progress

takepart.com - FIRST has 30% ,
pbconnect.com - FIRST has 2nd place with 4237 votes

there is also another thread tracking the progress of the pbconnect.com contest here:

http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/showthread.php?threadid=85993

as of 9:30pm EST FIRST is in 1st by 14 votes!!!

If you have some free time, it’s possible to vote as many times as you want for the second website on FIRST’s website

http://www.pbconnect.com/innovate/vote/

If you open this link up in Google chrome’s “incognito browser,” the site cannot log your IP address and you may vote as much as you want. Next time you’re sitting in front of the TV, vote a hundred times and help FIRST stay in first place

-Chinmay

In incognito mode, the website is still able to log your IP address (it even tells you this when you switch to incognito mode). It’s very easy to for PitneyBowes to detect this type of fraud. There have been numerous online contests where the winner was disqualified for this type fraud. I hope that no one in FIRST has done this, as PitneyBowes has clearly asked for one vote per person.

We’re making some progress…
Last time I checked, FIRST was around the bottom brackets…

Now we have 46% of the votes (2nd), and the leading is StoryCorps with …54%! :ahh:

FIRST is slipping from the top of takepart.com
32% compared to the 49% lead a week ago. Please set a reminder to keep voting every week !

http://www.takepart.com/membersproject/vote

FIRST is not competing with Storycorp. They give out 5 donations of $200,000 each for a total of $1,000,000. However, we have dropped and do need to remember to vote every week.

As of today, FIRST has 31%, Citizen School has 20%. Time to vote again. Remember we are allowed to vote once a week. $200,000 will buy alot of kits.

darn you gotta be eighteen to vote! some of us are still in high school. haha

As of today, FIRST has 30% , Citizen Schools 18%

Keep voting ! $200K could fund an entire new regional !
http://www.takepart.com/membersproject/vote

As of today, FIRST has 26%, Jumpstart for Young Children has 19% (Citizen Schools has 18%). Keep voting! :slight_smile:

Thanks for the reminder.

The gap is closing quickly, FIRST - 25% , Jumpstart - 20%

Keep voting and set weekly reminders to vote!

Just a reminder: this isn’t (supposed to be) a contest to see who can out-vote the others.

Think very carefully about what you’re supporting, and its impact. Also consider who really needs the money, and why.

Jumpstart is a very well-regarded program, and serves a purpose that could easily be considered more important than FIRST’s. Why? Because they’re targeting a demographic—very young children—who are the most impressionable and receptive to all forms of education and mentorship. (Money spent to improve their literacy will probably be more effective at increasing scholastic aptitude and intellectual curiosity than money spent on high school students.) With their overall focus on low-income areas, they’re also directing funding toward students who are least likely to be able to obtain this sort of support through other means.

Citizen Schools sounds reasonably promising and deserving as well; though by targeting middle schools, they don’t have the fundamental advantage that Jumpstart does.

On the other hand, maybe you’re of the opinion that education should be the focus of the schools themselves, and the schools receive sufficient public (or private) funding for that purpose already. (I’m just throwing that out as a strawman…) Perhaps in that case, it would be more immediately valuable to inspire a minority of students into becoming a scientifically-literate elite that can more effectively address technical problems. (That technocracy is a large part of what FIRST aims for.)

It’s not an open-and-shut case, and those are just examples from education policy. There are plenty of other organizations on that TakePart page that do good, useful work in other areas (though a couple are a little out of place among the serious contributors listed there). Maybe there’s another cause in another category that needs your vote more than FIRST does? Are American domestic issues more worthy of funding than multinational or global ones? But also consider that some of the options available are enormous international charities; will $200 000 really make a difference to them?

This isn’t to say that FIRST shouldn’t receive funding—because it’s clearly got a useful purpose. But you have to decide for yourselves whether this chunk of education funding is best allocated to FIRST, or to another worthy organization.

(This reminds me a little of the Google 10100 project—which appears to have stalled for the last several months.)