My friend Alex Steffan of WorldChanging asked me for money. It was in a novel way, and for a very worthy cause, so I’m posting the ask here.

Alex wrote:

I need to hit you up for some money. Not much, only $10, but still, your donation is critical for us, and here’s why.

Yahoo! is offering a $50,000 matching grant for the nonprofit which gets the largest number of donations before the end of the year using its new “charity badges.”

What matters is not the number of dollars, but the number of donors. Right now, you need 70 to be in the lead, but things are moving fast and we’d like 500 to be safe. If we’re winning on Dec 31st, we think one of our major donors may step in and help us with a large donation, so we’ll get the full $50K from Yahoo! $100,000 would be a major portion of our annual budget and you can help us win it.

That means that what we need are numbers. Even large numbers of people contributing the minimum of $10 each (though we are a highly-effective little non-profit and would be happy to put a larger contribution to good use).

Please help us by taking two minutes right now, clicking on the donate button in this link, and making a contribution to Worldchanging on Network for Good (it’s all safe and self-explanatory.)

I’m always intrigued by healthy online competitions, because they seem to consistently drive interest and traffic. They never get old. It’s an ancient trick that has translated extremely well into the online world, especially with instant feedback loops and transparency.

Since I’m currently reading Vonnegut’s “Galapagos” I’m a little fixated on healthy competition…