My charity is still in the Pepsi contest for December. Link is on the right of this page. I’m learning a lot about this. Seems like it would be a fun, easy contest….just get people to click, right?

Um, actually, no.

I’ve been researching this contest as well as reaching out to some contacts who have had success with it. First, Pepsi announced last year, pre-Super Bowl, that they would not pay $20million in Super Bowl ads, but would instead reinvest it in the community, a la this contest. I think that if my group had joined last winter or early spring, we would have had a much better chance.

But since then, this thing has evolved into a beast that probably not even Pepsi expected. First, different charities form alliances. “You get all your people to vote for us, and we’ll get all our people to vote for you” type of thing. Since everyone gets 10 votes/day, seems like a nice mutual arrangement. Except that of course, everyone is out for themselves. They want you to vote for them, but they don’t really want to vote for you. There’s even an email circulating around from one of the charities, in bold letters across the top it says “If you don’t have time, don’t worry about the other groups in our alliance, just make sure you vote for us.” Nice, huh? Especially when you look at their Pepsi page, there are lots of posts from other groups pledging their votes.

And, think about it. If you’re hunting down $250k, it’s worth a gamble to pay some part-timers to devote all of their time to rounding up volunteers and voting. If you win, you’re still ahead by more than $200k. And that is exactly what is happening with some of the bigger charities. They have designated voting banks and voter pools. They have volunteers rounding up votes around the clock, paying college kids to walk dorms and get text votes, walk the aisles at tailgating events to round up more votes.

But here’s the thing. IDEAS, my charity, is not a large organization. It’s run out of people’s homes. We’re an entirely parent-based organization. We don’t have enough clout to form alliances–the bigger groups aren’t hunting down our voting pool, they want to align with someone bigger. We’re entirely grass roots. We don’t have a giant mailing list that we can pull votes from. Heck, there are only a few hundred cases of idic15 diagnosed worldwide!

And given that, I’m very proud of us and what we’ve done–we’ve managed to hang out in places #30-#50 for several weeks, without the power of big alliances behind us. And our group is still very energetic about wanting to win, we just need your help.

Please vote, 3 times a day, every day in December. Online, text, facebook. If you have any questions or problems doing any of the methods, just post your question here. And please post it on your facebook and email it to friends, family, coworkers, anyone!

Let’s be the “little charity that could.” I may sound discouraged, but I’m not. I’m still giving it my all, still handing out my little voter slips to everyone I come into contact with. I’m disappointed that it’s not, I don’t know, more fair? Is that the wording I want to use? But I’m not discouraged about trying to get us to that $50k! Go, let’s do this!