Here’s Why the Geeks Doing Good Fundraiser is Awesome

If you watch our twitch stream, you know me: I’m Gray, the Executive Director and occasionally-frustrated Worldbuilders Weekly producer (thanks for your patience! Viva-moose!) 

When I started last February, Worldbuilders had just finished off their end-of-year fundraiser, gathering around $800,000 to send off to Heifer International. I was impressed, but they told me that was just “ok” – on really good years, like 2017, they’d raised over a million for the organization.

Meanwhile, along with the other duties of an incoming executive director, I was told we needed to get ready for the other annual fundraising event – what is known in the non-profit world as a “capacity fundraiser”. For us, that’s going to be an Indiegogo.

What’s a Capacity Fundraiser, Anyway?

This is the kind of event that often looks like a big gala, or weekend festival, where non-profits raise the funds that help them continue their mission for the rest of the year. It’s the “keep the lights on” fundraiser – metaphorically, we’re trying to fill up our gas tank to “capacity” (see? It does make sense) so we can keep going for the rest of the year.

Worldbuilders doesn’t have a gala or a festival. Instead, to raise money for capacity every year they hold a Geeks Doing Good showcase, putting out limited edition or new merchandise developed with authors and artists from stories that our supporters know and love.

It’s a pretty neat process, because it’s win-win-win (and sometimes another win). For example, a lot of artists who often went to conventions to make their living have been suffering with the pandemic. We work with them (win!) to create merchandise our supporters love (double win) and get some money from that sale to help support our charity work (triple win). In some cases, like #BookDrop2020 or the Masked Hero Initiative, it also has the side benefit of helping fight the pandemic, which is a quadruple win.

What’s so special about Geeks Doing Good?

Honestly? I don’t know about you, but for me it’s that for a while I get to play with fun stuff. I get a little shot of dopamine when I sip my coffee from my Auri’s Fulcrum mug, because Nate Taylor made the gear on it look the way I sometimes feel. It helps to wear the shirt with Chuck Wendig’s pandemic battle cry “It’s OK that you’re not OK” on it, because I need to be reminded of that sometimes. And I just plain giggle at the consternation on Pat Rothfuss’ face when he tries to reconcile the truly ridiculous branding of the “Jamdrian Jam Pack” with the fact that the locally-sourced jam inside is truly delicious.

Yeah, it’s been a lot of work for us as a team here at Worldbuilders to develop all of this geeky gear and get it into production in time for the showcase. But it’s also been a part of our day where we got to do the ultimate geeky theme: be a part of the stories we love, knowing that on July 13th we get to share them with everybody else. That’s what geeks do: we share the things we love.

And there’s more to come…

It’s not just the gear you see on our Indiegogo on the 13th. We have several surprises that we’ll be revealing as the week goes on, making more things available, so it’ll be worth checking back throughout the week.

We’ve also got streaming events happening every day, with authors, artists, and geeks talking about science fiction, fantasy, gaming, comics, bourbon, Dungeons & Dragons…all around the bigger thing we’re sharing: the joy of being geeks doing good.

We’ve been working hard to make this week happen – and we can’t wait for you to see everything we get to share!

http://igg.me/at/WB-GDG2020