The Blogosphere Charity Bake-off

Tomato Nation, a personal blog about the writer's less-than-extraordinary daily life, outdoes major sites at a fundraising.

How did an obscure personal blog that hardly anyone’s ever heard of win a fundraising competition by convincing its readers to chip in $111,352?

A vow of public humiliation, for one. Blogger Sarah Bunting, who describes her blog as a “stories-about-my-Roomba-chasing-my-cats kind of thing,” promised her readers that if they raised at least $100,000, she’d visit the landmarks of Washington, D.C., while dressed in a tomato outfit and upload video of the self-guided tour. “They know I’ll always do some stupid stunt to make the goal,” Bunting said.

The best explanation for Tomato Nation’s success could be described as “the Oprah Effect.”

Friday ended the monthlong annual “Blogger Challenge” on DonorsChoose.org, and once again, Bunting’s tiny blog, Tomato Nation, crushed the competition’s Goliaths. Bunting said she doesn’t want to brag, but “the next blog down in the general interest category raised $7,500 or something.” She also beat her own record of $108,000, which won her the competition last year.

Bunting herself helped initiate the annual Blogger Challenge four years ago on DonorsChoose.org, a site launched in spring 2000 by philanthropist Charles Best, a former social studies teacher at a Bronx public high school.

Here’s how the website works: Teachers can post requests for school supplies—anything from 35 copies of Johnny Tremain to a pair of box turtles for the classroom aquarium—and people can fund those requests directly. “These are teachers in high-poverty areas who are spending their own money on paper and pencils,” says Best. The model is wildly effective: In the eight years since the site launched, it’s raised $25 million.

The idea for a Donors Choose “Blogger Challenge” came to Bunting in 2004, right after the “No Child Left Behind” president was reelected. Bunting, a 35-year-old Brooklyn writer, found on the website a teacher’s request for a copy of George Orwell’s 1984. It seemed like an apt metaphor, so she asked her blog’s readers to fund the request. Within two weeks, they’d funded that request and several others to the tune of $25,000.

It was at this moment that Bunting and Best saw how blogs could extend the reach of the Donors Choose charity, and started up the annual competition that now hauls in millions every October.