WORKING ON THE BEST NETWORKING EVENTS IN SAN FRANCISCO/PHOTO COURTESY OF DOGBFF ON FACEBOOK

From entrepreneur education to a happy hour for dog lovers, RallyPadders (and those who love them) at Rally.org HQ and elsewhere in San Francisco keep their calendars full.

Raising a Glass to Man’s Best Friend

DogBff, the social-gaming mobile platform for dog owners—check out the impossibly adorable Facebook page—will host a wine tasting tomorrow, Saturday the 18th, at RallyPad. Besides a chance for dog lovers and their canine cohorts to mingle, attendees can learn more about DogBff’s newest creations, a Yelp web app for dog products and DogBff-Photo, which allows you to document your dog in all his/her cuteness with Apple’s various portable electronic devices. Check out the DogBff Meetup page for more details.

Crowdfunding Basics

Tom Serres, Rally.org’s intrepid co-founder and CEO, and Mindful Investors founding partner Stuart Rudick will give a joint lecture next Tuesday the 21st at Dominican University in San Rafael. They’ll draw on their experiences from the trenches of the cause economy to discuss how crowdfunding can help people create positive change in the world. Dominican’s School of Business and Leadership and Institute for Leadership Studies (ILS) host the breakfast event. You can learn more about it here or by contacting the ILS at 415-485-3202 or ILS@dominican.edu.

FUSION and International Justice

After Memorial Day weekend, get ready for the latest installment of FUSION, the ‘Pad’s monthly fashion, art, and music confab powered by FUSION’s ongoing Rally, on Wednesday the 29th.

The International Justice Resource Center holds a happy hour at the RallyPad on Friday the 31st. The IJRC joined Rally’s non-profit incubator last year, becoming one of roughly two dozen social-good organizations who’ve been working and connecting with other charitable innovators.

Startup Weekend’s NEXT Big Thing and Capitalizing on Community: A Recap

At the beginning of May, Startup Weekend NEXT hosted an event for aspiring impresarios that’s part of a recent collaboration with Google for Entrepreneurs, a collection of online resources and local programs.

Using seminar-style teaching, complete with video lectures and recommended readings, the new NEXT curriculum immerses participants in the Customer Development philosophy of writer, professor, and Silicon Valley gadfly Steve Blank, who created the Lean Launchpad program for building a startup. Customer Development focuses on interacting in person with potential customers to help grow your business. NEXT also uses Google+ Hangouts to train entrepreneurs and their instructors.

Also early in the month, “Capitalizing on Community” explored how organizations in the U.S. and U.K. have used community enterprise and equity investment to develop cities and their social infrastructure: think farmers markets, local currency, and independent craftsmen. Attendees learned about the Slow Money campaign to support small-scale food producers around Boulder, Colo., the community-owned Quimper Mercantile general store in Port Townsend, Wash., and the West Oakland People’s Community Market grocery store (also community-owned), across the bay from Rally.org headquarters.

The Product team at Rally.org recently introduced Covers, a striking new design feature that puts a photo or video front and center on your Rally’s Home Page to encourage your networks to donate. Did you know you can also use YouTube videos to inspire immediate giving?

YouTube has given Rally.org preferred access to a feature that lets users link their video directly from our platform to YouTube. Rally leaders can embed a “donate now!” button at the top of their videos, which directs back to the designated Rally fundraising page.

Check out the Spot for Jordy video below to see “donate now!” in action.

The best part about this functionality? The “donate now!” link will stay on the video whenever it’s embedded on another website.

YouTube offers these step-by-step instructions allowing you to host your Covers video on Rally.org and on YouTube to include a “donate now!” button to make supporting a Rally as fast and easy as possible.

Battlefield scars shouldn’t include the physical and emotional wounds that result from sexual assault. Along with Congress and the armed forces, advocates for sex-crimes victims in the military continue helping survivors heal and helping the armed services better document and prosecute sexual violence. One such program, inspired by an Oscar-nominated documentary, is currently crowdfunding on Rally.org.

Regina Kulik Scully, the executive producer of The Invisible War, established the Artemis Rising Invisible War Recovery Program after making the film. Scully teamed up with researchers and leading trauma therapists to create a pilot project that would alleviate the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder that victims of military sexual trauma (MST) experience.

She and other filmmakers have launched this Rally to help raise money for the Artemis pilot. Patients will receive a range of treatments at select residential facilities, such as individual psychotherapy, group therapy, and dance/movement therapy. Artemis completed its first 14-day program in Santa Barbara, Calif., in February and plans to start its second pilot project in June.

Military Sexual Assault in the News

The Artemis treatment program arrives at a crucial time for the armed services as they face more frequent sexual assault within their ranks.

Last Tuesday the Pentagon’s Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office presented a troubling report on rape and other offenses against active-duty personnel. Attacks have risen by as much as one-third in the last two years, from 19,000 incidents in 2010 to 26,000 in 2012.

In response the Air Force recently created the Special Victims’ Counsel Program. The pilot employs specially trained attorneys who expressed an interest in representing victims and guiding them through the trial process. In the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, lawmakers have recently introduced legislation to address legal representation for victims and punishment for service members found guilty of a sex crime.

Not Invisible

The Invisible War airs tonight on PBS. (You can check your local PBS listings for additional broadcast dates.) Invisible follows service members coping with the psychological and physical trauma of sexual assault at the hands of fellow soldiers and officers. The 2012 film received an audience award at Sundance last year and a 2013 Oscar nomination. You can learn more about MST at the Not Invisible website and donate to the Rally for Artemis/Not Invisible here.

Innovation, relationships, and technology inspire the students at Manor New Technology High School near Austin, Tex.

So do robots, roller derby, and the prom.

This week, President Obama will get an education on campus happenings when he visits Manor New Tech during a trip to Texas to promote his ideas on job creation.

As the president presents possible solutions for improving the economy, Manor New Tech students team up to work on their own answers to problems large and small. That’s all part of the school’s focus on project-based learning, in which students learn by doing—in most cases, by identifying a challenge, then researching and experimenting to come up with a result that works.

One problem-solving strategy: online fundraising for extracurricular events and activities. Three different groups within the school community have taken to crowdfunding on Rally.org to help finance three very different projects.

Robots Rock

Manor New Tech’s medal-winning robotics team, FRC 2789, were fundraising to cover transportation costs to the FIRST Championship in St. Louis, Mo., a contest where middle-school and high-school teams compete each April. In 2011 and 2012, the team received the Entrepreneurship Award, and they reached the finals for the first time in 2013. Unusual side note: The FRC 2789 team is about 50 percent female, in an academic area where males make up about 75 percent of most teams.

Rollergirl, Jr.

Manor New Tech’s girls rule at more than just robotics: About 15 girls wanted to start up a junior roller-derby team, in the spirit of Austin’s world-famous Texas Rollergirls, so they’ve been raising money to buy skates, helmets, pads, and guards. The school largely serves a lower-income community (more than half of Manor New Tech students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch), so clubs and teams look to outside funding to pay for equipment and fees.

Prom Time

It’s prom season across the country, so Manor New Tech’s juniors have been rallying to put on a vintage-themed prom for the senior class. The old-school night of glamour happens this weekend at the Etter-Harbin Alumni Center at the University of Texas. (How shocking would it be to see President and Mrs. Obama all dolled up in formalwear and out on the dance floor?)

Manor New Tech High School opened six years ago with a $4 million grant from the Texas High School Project, which works to create and promote public schools focused on the STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering, math). The school belongs to the New Tech Network, a non-profit that works for public-education innovation through project-based learning.

To learn more about Manor New Tech students and their inspiring work, as well as connect with the community and support their Rallys, check out their fundraisers for the robotics team, the Rollergirls, and the prom committee.

GOV. PAT BROWN (GRANDPA OF RALLY.ORG’S HILARY ARMSTRONG) AND SON JERRY BROWN IN 1981

We love the inspiring, deeply moving, and even humorous stories behind the individuals and organizations using Rally.org to change their world—as well as similar stories from within our ranks. So we want to congratulate Rally.org’s own Hilary Armstrong for getting an Emmy nomination this week for California State of Mind: The Legacy of Pat Brown.

A portrait of former California governor Edmund G. “Pat” Brown, the film was created and directed by Brown’s granddaughter, Sascha Rice. Armstrong served as executive producer; she’s also Rice’s sister. The siblings used family photos, personal film footage, and private documents to tell the story of a clan christened by Californians as “the West Coast Kennedys.” (One more tidbit from the family tree: Current California governor Jerry Brown is Pat’s son.)

The documentary received the Emmy nod from the San Francisco/Northern California chapter of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. Armstrong has created a Rally to help add California State of Mind to the public school system’s state-history curriculum.

Armstrong found one surprise after another during the seven years that the sisters worked on the production. “My favorite part…was discovering the incredible history of my grandfather’s legacy,” she explains. “Before making the film I didn’t even know that he worked with Martin Luther King, Jr. [after the 1965 Watts riots in L.A.]. I also didn’t know that he was in the White House during the Cuban Missile Crisis.”

And she saw and heard humor and joy in even the most mundane moments: “I loved it when my sister discovered old recordings of my grandfather talking to LBJ. They are pretty amusing, and everyone always laughs when they hear them.”

Armstrong hopes California State of Mind and her Rally for broader distribution of it will motivate young people, with or without famous family connections, to enter politics.

“We need more great people with integrity and commitment to run for office,” she says. “We hoped that by making this film we might inspire the next generation to make a difference in their own way.”

PHOTO COURTESY OF MENTOR ME INDIA

A shy, artistic girl named Pinkie, standing in a corner by herself in a classroom, got Dayoung Lee thinking about creating a one-on-one mentoring program for Indian schoolchildren.

Lee, the founder and executive director of Mentor Me India, recalls meeting Pinkie while volunteering at an after-school program for underprivileged children in Mumbai. Lee soon learned that the girl’s parents and teacher never gave her enough attention to understand why she isolated herself.

“I was sad and frustrated that Pinkie’s life seemed stalled already,” says Lee.

With parents working round the clock in low-wage jobs and teachers with too many students to provide any one of them individualized support, students struggle in their classes and throughout their schooling as they try to navigate the system with little help from adults.

Thinking about the introverted little girl she met in Mumbai, Lee says, “I imagined how different Pinkie’s life would be if she had one person that cared about her with the time and resources to make a difference.”

So Lee has created Mentor Me India as a variation on the Big Brothers Big Sisters model: Pairing children in low-income neighborhoods with professionals for one-on-one mentoring. But even a successful American program needs a little fine-tuning before a similar version debuts overseas. Parents in India play a much bigger role in making life decisions for their children, so Mentor Me India will spend more time establishing trust between mentors and parents. Lee also points out that there will likely be much greater socioeconomic differences between mentors and their students, so mentors will receive training in how to navigate that cultural divide.

Mentor Me India has launched a Rally to help start up the “Mentor Me Didi” pilot project this summer for girls ages 9 to 12 in a government school in Mumbai. (“Didi” is an affectionate term for “older sister” in Hindi.) The pilot focuses on girls, Lee explains, because girls often have greater household responsibilities, and disadvantaged families usually choose to educate sons over daughters.

Lee says that the program will scout for a diverse group of mentors through the alumni networks of educational nonprofits and top U.S. and Indian colleges, as well as corporate partners. She hopes to take Mentor Me India’s pilot to other cities around the country and to offer mentoring for boys, as well.

You can contribute to the Rally for Mentor Me India here. The organization launches tonight at an event in Cambridge, Mass.

Quick Pledge allows you to choose, right from your mobile phone, which Rallys you’d like to financially support. When you arrive at the Home Page of any Rally, you’ll see the Quick Pledge button at the bottom of the page. This function uses your Facebook login to swiftly and seamlessly pledge a gift to a Rally, and you can share your pledged donation across social media to tell your friends you’re backing a cause that matters to you.

But you haven’t handed over your credit card just yet—a Quick Pledge is a promise to give to a Rally. Once you’ve pledged your support, Rally.org‘s system will prompt you via email with a reminder to donate, which you can do when you’ve returned to your computer. You can also change the amount of money you’d like to give, simply by clicking on a higher dollar value or filling in your own total.

We built Quick Pledge because we found that very few people donated to Rallys via mobile: It’s tricky to take a credit card out of your wallet and input the numbers while you’re, say, walking to lunch, running to catch a flight, or, of course, talking or texting on your phone. Let us know what you think about Quick Pledge or any of our other new product features—we’d love to hear from you.

Pictures inspire awe, joy, anger, or contemplation. As Steve Moakley knows, photos can also spur people to action, spreading awareness about, volunteering their time for, or giving money to a cause that matters to them.

The Austin, Tex.-based photographer has recently spent his career documenting the passions of non-profits. He’s collaborated with Jane’s Due Process, which works to secure legal help for pregnant teens in Texas, and the Multicultural Refugee Coalition, which helps refugees adjust to life in their new homeland.

In July 2012 Moakley led an editorial team that recorded interviews and shot photos (including the one above) and video at the Jean Baptiste Dessaix Music School for children in Jacmel, Haiti, producing multimedia stories about students and the volunteers teaching them. (The school received America’s highest award for youth humanities programs in 2010.)

“My time in Haiti really galvanized the impression in me that I need to be telling these stories and finding stories of progress and good that are going on in places where most people don’t expect that to be happening,” says Moakley.

He plans to channel those experiences into philanthropic-storytelling and -photography training with Momenta Workshops this June. He’s received a partial scholarship, so he’s taken to Rally.org to raise money for his airfare and the remainder of his tuition before arriving in Cape Town for Project South Africa. Rewards for his Rally’s donors include signed prints of photos he’ll produce while he’s in Cape Town or prints of photos like this one and others that he’s taken over the years.

Based in Washington, D.C., Momenta Workshops runs courses in other cities, pairing media professionals with non-profits to document their community projects. Before starting a workshop participants complete questionnaires and list their preferred subject areas—in Moakley’s case, he’s indicated interest in issues including education, women’s rights, and HIV/AIDS awareness and treatment.

“These photos and these photo stories will help the organizations that I donate them to get the story out about what they’re trying to do, raise awareness for their cause, and raise awareness just that they’re there,” he says. “I’d like to be able to continue this effort and be able to give back to places that need it because they need their stories told, too.”

Rocky Braat, a graphic designer disenchanted with his life in the U.S., transformed an impromptu trip to India into a social and spiritual mission.

In his travels through Chennai, on India’s southeastern coast, Rocky visited an orphanage for children torn from their villages by HIV and AIDS. Not even teenagers, these kids grappled with serious health problems and the agony of abandonment and rejection by their families. Despite their fate, they were happy and loving—boundlessly so. Rocky vowed to make their lives better and within a year, he’d moved permanently to Chennai to run the orphanage. “Rocky Anna,” which means “Brother Rocky” in Tamil, serves as teacher, doctor, dentist, father, and friend to dozens of children living with AIDS.

Rocky Anna and the kids are the subjects of the film Blood Brother, which won the documentaries grand jury prize and audience award for U.S. docs at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival. The accolades and the film itself—charming, heart-wrenching, revelatory—have brought the orphanage much-needed attention and money, but Rocky’s work continues. He plans to expand housing for teens aging out of the orphanage and offer computer training to jumpstart their career education.

Before he can start those projects though, Rocky’s got to feed the kids. Eggs and milk for growing youngsters don’t come cheap, so Danny Yourd, a producer on Blood Brother, launched a Rally.org campaign to buy one year’s worth of eggs (that’s more than 24,000 of them) and milk packets (almost 11,000).

You can catch a trailer for the film at Rally.org/bloodbrother and learn more about Rocky and the children at http://www.bloodbrotherfilm.com.

Josef “Mojo” Kainrad always wanted to bike across the U.S., but his jobs kept him from taking off the time to do it. Like his gig touring as a “merch man” for Christian-metal band Mouth of the South, helping them sell CDs and other items. Including bracelets, the proceeds of which went to a charitable project he’d never heard of: Abolition International’s To Be Free campaign.

As Kainrad learned about how the organization battles sex trafficking and advocates on behalf of victims, he decided to go on that bike trip after all, but for a cause. The 22-year-old from Denton, Tex., launched aRally.org fundraiser for his cross-country tour to raise awareness about To Be Free’s safe-house project, which runs 12 rehabilitation homes for girls exiting the sex trade, including eight houses in the U.S.

Kainrad has blogged about the Bike To Be Free trip since last summer, sharing photos of benefit events in his honor and his travel preparations, plus some humorous but painful lessons learned on theroad and his inspiration for taking on this coast-to-coast adventure.

“I don’t ever expect to meet anyone that I help,” Kainrad says. “I don’t expect their gratitude…I just want to serve them. They should know that there are people out there fighting for them.”

Bike To Be Free started on April 1 in Bern, N.C., and will wrap up in San Francisco, spanning approximately 3,500 miles in eight weeks. Local hardcore bands in the cities where Kainrad will be stopping—Albuquerque and Oklahoma City among them—will host benefit shows for his Rally, including an April 19 gig in Springfield, Mo. He’s battled wind, rain, and hills and spoken about human trafficking at a community church, making new friends, trying new beers, and finding new couches to sleep on .

Kainrad’s not solo-cycling the whole trip: Friends will join him during the Oklahoma stretch, and a fellow Rally.org fundraiser for To Be Freewill ride with him for the last leg of the tour through California. His friends from The Village Church in Denton will meet him in San Francisco in late May, and they all plan to ride back to Texas together.

You can follow Mojo’s journey, from the anxiety-ridden planning stage to the literal white-knuckled twists and turns of the road on his blog.