Ashley Berman Hale has a strong and loving community. She leads the Raleigh SEO Meetup and was kind enough to take me under her wing as an assistant organizer just a month or two after I started attending.
Ashley has been adamant about never charging for any event and always doing as much as possible. It’s clearly the best meetup in the Triangle (yes, even better than the ones you may be paying for). She has also made her self available to answer questions gratis. Ashley has also answered so many questions (7001 as of this writing) at Google Webmaster Central that they made her an official Google Bionic Poster.
Now, she is due to have a baby on Labor Day 2010.
I logged on to the Meetup.com site and sent out a quick email asking people to donate if they felt like they’ve gotten some value from Ashley in the past and would like to contribute to a Babies-R-Us gift card.
Within 2 minutes I had received notification of over $200 in donations. Within 10 minutes we were at about $500.
This post isn’t about the money, but the outpouring of love for a leader who always put her art above herself.
I’ll try to surprise Ashley at the next SEO meetup with the proceeds.
UPDATE: We ended up raising over $750 from the most awesome community in Raleigh!
Karl Sakas says
What a nice outpouring of support to help someone who has been so generous in helping others. Thanks for organizing this, Phil (and kudos to Janet Kennedy for the initial idea). See you back in a few months, Ashley!