After Black Friday? Giving Tuesday

First came Black Friday. Long before being known for bargain hunters duking it out in big box stores, the day took its name, more than three-quarters of a century ago, from Philadelphia traffic cops describing the jammed Center City streets at the start of the Christmas season.

Next there's Cyber Monday, manufactured by marketers in 2005 to promote the first workday after Thanksgiving as the time to go online and buy what you couldn't find Friday.

After all that, aren't you ready for Giving Tuesday?

The idea of a good-doing day was advanced last year by Henry Timms of New York's 92nd Street Y and seeks to claim the time as an antidote to acquisitiveness that harnesses the power of philanthropy.

As Timms has put it: "We have two days that are good for the economy. Here's a new day good for the soul."

While this is a national movement, nonprofits are particularly geared up here, says Beverly Greenfield, spokeswoman for the 92nd Street Y.

Bucks County groups have made it easier to give to more than 80 organizations gathered at one website: http://www.givingtuesdaybucks.org.

Betsy Anderson of the Philadelphia Foundation says city groups have been meeting since spring to coordinate their efforts. They have a Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/givingtuesdayPHL), a Twitter handle (@givingtuesphl), and a website (generocity.com) to spread the word - and there's a lot of word to spread.

Postdoc fellows at the Wistar Institute have dropped a video made to the tune of "Cups (When I'm Gone)" to encourage donations for cancer research in light of budget cuts to the National Institutes of Health.

Community Legal Services is collecting photos for an album of what justice - and injustice - looks like.

HIAS Pennsylvania will receive a share of the profits from that day - from such Philadelphia restaurants as National Mechanics, Lucha Cartel, Jyoti, Royal's, and Aya's Cafe - to benefit aid for immigrants.

Juvenile in Justice and InLiquid Art & Design will sponsor a clinic to create second chances by expunging juvenile detention records.

An anonymous donor has offered to match all Giving Tuesday gifts to Habitat for Humanity.

As the day approaches, participants have been tweeting and posting about their good works by including the phrase #GivingTuesday.

There's a more interesting hashtag being used: #unselfie.

You know #selfie - it's the Oxford Dictionary's word of the year, officially "a photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically one taken with a smartphone or webcam and uploaded to a social media website."

It's also the portrait of self-absorption.

Compare that to the #unselfie, which Giving Tuesday organizers envision as photographs people take of themselves as they do good deeds.

(Yes, unshared good deeds are still good indeed.)

Giving Tuesday has grown quickly. Last year, 2,500 groups partnered from across the country. Total contributions are hard to tally, Bernstein says, but companies that process online contributions reported raising about 50 percent more than during that same day in 2011, before Giving Tuesday began.

This year, more than 7,500 groups are partnering, among them eBay, Microsoft, Groupon, J.C. Penney, US Airways, Unilever, and Avon.

"We created this intentionally as an open-source movement," said Greenfield. "We put it out on social media to encourage people to make it their own and share with others. We also tapped into a sense of the social media community of wanting to use the medium to do something positive. I think social media gets a reputation for, oh, shall we say, not always focusing on the most important."

215-854-5958 @danielrubin