Our friends (and clients) at Vancity's ChangeEverything.ca community are running a great little contest with a cool twist. Blog about a good cause (at ChangeEverything.ca), tag it "changesomething", whip up some buzz around it, and you could win a $1,000 donation from Vancity to the group you blogged about.

They're doing in in celebration of their new branches, which just opened. What I love about this is the chance to give some profile to the smaller groups out there, the folks for whom $1,000 could make a real difference.

Best-case scenario: a good cause gets the money. Worst-case scenario: even the groups that don't win get some real profile in a community of more than 1,500 people dedicated to change. And either way, some important stories get told.

Our good friends (and clients) at Vancity are running a contest on ChangeEverything.ca. The $500 first prize is great, but the cool thing about it as far as I'm concerned is, it's the ideal way for a beginner to dip their toes into the blogging waters.

Here's how the Viva la resolution! contest works in five easy steps:

1. You sign up on the site. (It's free, and no salesperson will call.)
   
2. You decide on a resolution – something you want to change in 2007 about yourself, your community or your world.
3. You blog on the site about your progress in making that change and include the tag (i.e. keyword) "resolution".
4. A panel of judges checks out your resolution and blog posts, and picks out the top three resolutions.
5. If yours is one of them, you walk away with a $50, $100 or $500 Visa gift card.

So why's it ideal for a beginning blogger? Here are five handy reasons:

• ChangeEverything.ca is a friendly community. Your chances of getting helpful, supportive comments are excellent.
• It takes just seconds to set up a blog, and you have an instant built-in readership: the hundreds of other members of ChangeEverything.ca, and the thousands of visitors to the site.
• Site moderator Kate Dugas is happy to help you if you run into a roadblock.
• If you made New Year's resolutions, you have built-in fodder for writing blog posts.
  
• A $500 Visa gift card would be a pretty good reward for a first outing.

So if you know someone who's been itching to start blogging, this could be the ticket. (And feel free to download the poster [PDF, 250kb] for the contest if you want to spread the word.)

Our friends at ChangeEverything.ca want to send some lucky Vancouver-area bloggers to see a free Bard on the Beach performance:

Blog about changing your community, and you could find yourself at Bard on the Beach, courtesy of our Blogging for Change contest!

Just add a blog post to ChangeEverything.ca related to our current change theme of Change Your Community, no later than 5:00 PM PT on Wednesday September 13th 2006 for your chance to win a pair of tickets to the Sept. 17th Bard on the Beach presentation of Measure for Measure.

And if you haven't checked out ChangeEverything.ca yet, we hope you do. Not just because we built it for Vancity, and not just because Vancity is such a kickass community leader in these here parts, and not even because we're thrilled with how it's turning out, but because we'd love to know what you think.