Building Philanthropy in the Triangle

My friend Dan is launching a great organization called Triangle Gives Back with the goal of engaging corporations in the Triangle area of North Carolina to give more back to the community. The Triangle area ranks highly in many national lists that compare quality of living, education, business climate, universities, etc but its rankings for philanthropy are a little further down the list. Triangle Gives Back will be a hub for businesses, employees, organizations, and individuals to discuss opportunities for giving and partnering across the divide between for-profit and not-for-profit sectors.

As one specific example, businesses will pledge discounts to qualified member not-for-profit organizations who can then take advantage of the service or product discounts. Preation has pledged a discount for Eden Platform’s monthly subscription cost to Triangle Gives Back. Under this arrangement Triangle based charitable organizations can optimize their websites with no technical or marketing expertise required at a low and discounted cost. Eden Platform is offered with no setup fee and no term commitment so not-for-profit organizations can rest easy knowing that Preation has entirely removed the risk from the process of optimizing a website for the search engines. Non-profit organizations use Eden Platform to reduce cost and delays, empower staff and volunteers, and expand the reach and influence of their missions online.

Team Preation/iContact Places 3rd in Charity Plane Pull Event

Team Preation/iContact placed third out of 65 corporate teams at the 2008 Plane Pull at RDU to benefit the Special Olympics of North Carolina. Five team members representing both Preation and iContact pulled an American Airlines Embraer Regional Jet (weighing 40,000 lbs) along a 25ft course in a record 10.00 second time.

The pull time of 10.00 seconds qualified us in the top ten overall and we got to pull again to determine the top three placing teams. In the first round of pulls our time ranked 2nd among all teams, including the 10 additional law enforcement teams. In the championship round our second pull time of 10.14 seconds was good enough for fourth overall and third among other corporate competitors. These two pulls were the only attempts our team has ever done since this was our first year to compete in a plane pull competition and since no one could turn up an extra Regional Jet for us to practice on before the competition. Bummer.

Video of our second plane pull is on YouTube. Also, video of some commentary from myself and my wife Sarah our photographer/videographer between the two plane pulls for the event is on YouTube as well. Team members on the rope in the second pull video are (from left to right): Dwayne Taylor, myself, Wes Garrison, Lynn Morehouse, and Justin Rauschenberg. The event was held on April 19th at the Raleigh/Durham International Airport in North Carolina.

Special Olympics of North Carolina raised over $150,000 this year from the Plane Pull event.