Our Mission: We host music concerts to raise money and awareness for nonprofits fighting poverty at the local level.

Our Model Summarized:  Organize and promote a concert with a great band or bands. Recruit sponsors and supporters. Have fun listening to great music. Give away all net funds raised to a charity fighting poverty in the community of the concert. Repeat. 

Amplify My Community is a visioning and fundraising organization that distributes resources to other nonprofits that directly provide services to the community. Our mission is to leverage the universal love of music to fight poverty at the local level by generating funds and awareness for community nonprofits that are making a difference every day.

The traditional model for fundraising nonprofits (like cancer research, for instance) is to fundraise, pay overhead out of the funds raised, and direct the balance to the nonprofit of their choice. For example, many organizations are proud to pass on 80 cents of every dollar raised.

Amplify is different. We combine the generosity and courage of our donors with the power of the market to generate even greater resources and impact for our community beneficiaries, and the people in need who they serve.

The donations we receive produce concerts that raise money primarily through the participation of our attendees, who purchase tickets, merchandise, and silent auction items; and sponsors who want to be associated with our events.

The end result is much larger gifts and more community impact than would be possible by simply deducting overhead from our fundraising totals and passing along the difference. In other words, Amplify My Community takes our donors’ generosity and multiplies it, rather than subtracting from it. We call this Philanthropic Investment.

Every dollar we raise at our concerts is directed to our community beneficiaries. It’s true, Amplify does not withhold a single nickel from our concerts for administrative costs. This is possible only because of our model, and our generous organizational donors, sponsors, and granting organizations who support us. They believe that we have found a better way to operate a nonprofit, and they trust our ability to take their hard-earned donations and produce concerts to raise even more money for our cause.

There are tremendous benefits to separating Amplify My Community’s operational fundraising (which covers administrative costs and allows us to produce the concerts) from the balance sheet of the concerts themselves.

First, our donors understand our model, and that we are going to leverage their generosity to produce more funds for our beneficiaries (by investing in high-quality musical talent, marketing, and merchandise). This allows us to take educated, market-based risks that generate more funding and impact—the kind that most nonprofits cannot take because of their bylaws and the expectations of their donors.

Secondly, our message that “Every dollar raised at our concerts stays local” is a powerful one that both underscores our mission and motivates communities to rally behind a cause, thereby producing even more resources and impact for our charities.

It is important to understand that the traditional nonprofit model of raising funds, deducting overhead, and passing on the difference, while ingrained for many of us, was born before the information age when smaller nonprofits did not have the communications tools necessary to effectively fundraise, and donors did not have access to the information needed to make wise giving decisions. That landscape has changed. Amplify believes simply fundraising and selecting other groups to receive the funds is not enough. We owe our donors a way to make more impact. At Amplify, we think we’ve found it.