We’ve been happy in recent months to get to know Charles Best, a former teacher in the New York City public schools who founded a nonprofit called DonorsChoose that makes great use of the Web.
DonorsChoose enables you to bring a classroom project to life—a reading corner, a field trip, a computer lab, or whatever most inspires you. Search for a state, ZIP code or topic and you’ll see specific projects you can support. The Omidyar Network, an early investor in FM, is supporting the effort, and it’s already paying off for kids and teachers all over the United States.
We’re so excited about their upcoming Blogger Challenge that we’ve distributed a philanthropic gift certificate to each FM author, so they can fund the classroom projects of their choice and then encourage their readers to help out.
We’re also sponsoring an award for the bloggers (FM or not — open to all) who come up with the most creative incentive for their readers to give. So see what you can do with your passionate readers!

Does it seem like FM is growing? Yup, we sure are. Two more great additions to report today: Karleen Engel joins us as an Account Coordinator in our sales department just months after graduating from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles with a Public Relations degree and a Business Administration minor. I’m willing to give her the benefit of the doubt, even though my Golden Bears are ranked a few notches below her Trojans….Karleen has had a variety of internships including one in the PR department of fashion house Michael Kors in NYC as well as one with Santa Monica based online media company Demand Media. Originally from Texas, she is excited to get to know the Bay Area.

And Galina Lee joins us as assistant to Chas Edwards, our CRO and Publisher. It’s about time, Chas really has been a bit frazzled lately, what with leading the team that has taken FM and its authors to quarterly eight-figure revenues. Galina joins FM after 10 years of senior executive assistance, most recently from the entertainment and media world where she was the administrator and broadcast producer for Coyote Films.

Welcome, Galina and Karleen!

James Navin joined us last month as Vice President, Product Management. James possesses a broad professional background that includes time spent in the Internet, telecom, software, and energy industries in corporate functions ranging from Product Management to Business Development to Accounting. He came to FM following two years of leading the Product Management function at Yipes, an enterprise network service provider. His academic years were spent studying Economics and Statistics when, among other things, he once taught an undergraduate Finance class on commodities derivatives theory. Welcome to FM, James!

If you’re interested in that conference FM hosted earlier this month, the first batch of videos are up. Some are quite long, and take a while to load in flash, but once they do, they play smoothly. My favorites:

The Opening (yeah, it’s me, but I frame what I mean by all this, if that interests you.)

Scott Cook (very thoughtful)

Steve Hayden sets up the day

More will be up as time permits, so check back if you’re interested.

Mark Cheong joins us as an account executive in our Bay Area office. Mark has over seven years of experience in sales/biz dev roles at entrepreneurial oriented companies in both the traditional and online marketing worlds. Recently, he was the General Manager of a boutique digital marketing firm based in the “OC.” He received his MBA from Pepperdine’s Graziadio School of Business. When not voraciously consuming media or imposing his musical tastes on others, he can be found attempting to write somewhat coherently on his blog here.

Chas has written up a great example of the kind of conversational marketing FM can bring to brands like JC Penney, in this case, a Fall Shopping Guide.

John Schnieder joins FM as our Director of Sales, East from Yahoo. After dabbling in finance and telecom, he established himself in the internet community with HotJobs.com in 1999 and stayed on after being acquired by Yahoo in 2002. Starting off in San Francisco and ultimately ending up in New York, he served as an integral part of the sales organization as an Account Executive, Sales Manager, and Director of Sales. Originally from Boston, John graduated from Wake Forest University in North Carolina. Welcome, John!

Liam Boylan joins the FM advertising operations team from Waiterpad Point-of-Sale Systems, where honed his client service and tech troubleshooting skills. A graduate of Santa Clara University, he holds a bachelor’s degree in Communications and Studio Art. Liam enjoys art and design tasks recreationally and on an occasional freelance basis, and considers himself one of the greatest Mario Soccer stylists alive. Welcome to the team!

David Churbuk is a marketer, he works with Lenovo. He’s a pretty senior dude. And he writes one killer blog. This post is a great exemplar. Marketers with voices like this, well, it warms my heart.

It was a crowded week, with a lot of news, but I wanted to point you all to this announcement from Comscore, in which conversational media gets a new and more accurate look. Finally. FM was part of making this happen, and I am very proud we were.

Coverage here and here and here.