The Harry Potter Alliance

By Kate Looby

July 14, 2010

The HPA wins $250,000, and we blink stupidly in amazment and gratitude.

On Monday, at 11:59pm EST, The Harry Potter Alliance won the grand prize of $250,000 from the Chase Community Giving challenge on Facebook. There was a lot of cheering involved. For those who don’t know, I’m Kate and I’m one of the Co-coordinators for this project. I helped Andrew and The HPA Staff get organized as we strategized and pushed to get our voters over to Facebook. I think I did okay. I want to tell you a little bit of the story behind this competition.

It was a month long contest, and during the entire span, the entire four weeks, The HPA was in either 1^st, 2^nd, or 3^rd place. We never dropped lower than that at any point, and we were only in 3^rd place for two or three days at most.

I thought we were the underdogs, but when you think about those rankings, it just seems patently untrue. In hindsight, we were more like Vocal Adrenaline. Or at least, those rankings make it appear that we were The-Force-To-Be-Reckoned-With.

But in truth, we felt very much like the underdogs here. We found out early on that last time, that third place and up had gotten… get this… 90,000+  votes.

90,000+ votes? We couldn’t do that. We knew it. We were scared. “Should we even bother pouring our sweat and blood into this project if that’s what we have to reach? Maybe we should just shoot for a 20K prize.” A couple of things made us go for it anyway. Firstly, last time the prize was $1 million, so the stakes were much, much, much higher. Secondly, a lot of organizations that have excellent social networking systems and a big online following… well, most of those organizations made a bid for that $1 million last time, and therefore were ineligible to compete this time around. So we decided to go for it. We went all in.

And in the end we didn’t get 90,000+ votes. We got a little big over 38,000.  And we won. This time, the contest happened on an entirely different, an entirely smaller scale. I remember telling Andrew a week into the contest “Look, the way things are going, I sincerely doubt the winner this time will have anywhere near 100,000 votes.” (Invisible Children, the winners last time, had 120,000+). Boy, I’m glad I was right about that.

But smaller scale or not, I am still stunned when I think about the final week of the Chase Community Giving Contest. I still catch myself thinking, “Wait, we actually won?” I don’t think it’s sunk in yet. I don’t think it will for a while.

Those of you who joined our staff during the past weeks, you heard me repeat over and over and over “We CAN do this! We WILL do this.” I truly believed that we had the potential to win, but even still… a small part of me felt like a liar every single time I made that bold assertion. This past week has taught me not to doubt. Not to doubt myself, not to doubt the HPA’s staff, not to doubt the hundreds of volunteers who poured in to help Monday evening, not to doubt Nerdfighteria or Youtube, and not to doubt that people in the world truly do care about making it more awesome – we only need the chance.

I cannot thank everyone who deserves to be thanked for making this happen, there are simply too many of you. But I do want to thank a few people for helping me keep my pickles during our aptly-named “insanity week.” Thank you to Michelle, my HPAFTW co-coordinator extraordinaire. Thank you to Taekia my Staff Coordinator of Awesomesauce who kinda turned into a co-coordinator of this project despite declaring she’d “keep out of it.” Thank you to senior staffer Karen, who didn’t have the time, but found some anyway, to make it to our livestreams and save me when I was too exhausted to cheer everyone on. To all the managers and regular HPA staffers who worked their collective asses off to contact HUNDREDS of other Harry Potter fan sites, other fandoms, livejournals, facebook groups, you guys deserve to preserved in jelly so that in the future we can pick apart your brains and figure out how you managed to be so cool.  To everyone who voted, thank you.

To my HPAFTW staff: I watched you guys grow from 5 to 200 in a matter of weeks. And without you, we would never have gotten first place. I don’t know how you all managed to put up with hearing me talk for so long on livestream, but I love you all. I have never had so much fun in a Skype chat in my life. DFTBA guys, and I hope you all stick around and join our regular staff.

And finally, to Mr. Andrew Slack: Thank you for working tirelessly, even when things looked grim for a while. Thank you for your Buffy-inspired speeches. And thank you for calling me up that day, two and half years ago, and inviting me onto The HPA Staff. I would not be the person I am today without The Harry Potter Alliance.

So that’s the end of my speech-ifying! Folks, stick around. We’ll have more news for you about HPAFTW very, very soon.

For those of you who are interested, I’ll be on Livestream in about an hour (9:30pm EST). You’re welcome to join.