One 'Citizen Philanthropy' Project to Be Big Winner in NCAA Championship

As the Butler University Bulldogs and University of Connecticut Huskies face off in tonight's NCAA basketball championship game, one charitable initiative is channeling a portion of dog-eat-dog bracket winnings to underdogs everywhere.

For a $10 fee, hundreds of people nationwide combined March Madness with friendly philanthropy, entering Citizen Effect's Brackets With Benefits project. The top dog of the social-good bracket will pick from among the hundreds of "citizen philanthropy" projects listed on Citizen Effect's website -- from clean water in India to school supplies in Rwanda.

"We debuted Brackets With Benefits in 2010 and found that there were a lot of other people out there who wanted to combine their interest in the tournament with a desire to give back," Brett Walling of Citizen Effect told AOL News via email.

"Like a lot of other people, we were getting excited and reading a lot of the coverage of the upcoming tournament, and we started to wonder if we could take all the excitement surrounding the games and turn it into a way to make a significant impact for the communities we serve throughout the world."

Washington, D.C.-based Citizen Effect gives individuals the opportunity to not just donate to causes but to organize, lead and complete small philanthropy projects that fill critical needs in communities everywhere. The organization describes its mission as providing "everyday citizens the tools and networks they need to work directly with communities in need around the world."

"This year, we announced that our grand prize winner would decide which Citizen Effect project would receive all the money we raised, and we've seen a huge response, with almost 1,000 people signing up and filling out a bracket," Walling said.

Tonight's winner will have a pot of more than $10,000 to disburse to one of the hundreds of Citizen Effect's small projects focusing on a variety of charities, including back-to-school supplies in the Eastern Provinces of Rwanda, clean water in Dekvi, India, and a nutrition program for school lunches in Ica City, Peru.

For 2011, Citizen Effect tipped off Brackets With Benefits with a splashy launch party at film, music and interactive conference SXSW hosted by crowdsourcing specialist CrowdFlower. A social media campaign netted another sponsor, the Case Foundation, which learned of the project via Twitter.

Critically, Walling said that the organizers also prioritized the recruitment of companies and other office pools to sign up to capitalize on the number of regular annual tournaments in the workplace.

"We put a lot of work into reaching out to individuals to sign up for Brackets With Benefits with their workplace because many offices already plan annual tournaments, so it was mostly a matter of getting offices to add some good to their pools -- it worked and it really increased participation in the tournament this year.

"It was this approach of having the donations go toward a community building project that we feel really motivated participants to get as many of their friends and co-workers involved as possible," he added, noting that repeat Brackets With Benefits participant Edelman, the national global communications firm, recruited 14 of its offices to participate in this year's pool.

And amid the bracket-busting dramatic upsets this year, CrowdFlower also created a portal for new Sweet Sixteen and Final Four picks, giving participants another shot at winning other prizes, including an iPad and FlipVideo camcorders.