By Maja Beckstrom

St. Paul Pioneer Press

The American Civil Liberties Union, along with Planned Parenthood, attracted an unusually high number of donations during this year’s Give to the Max Day, in the wake of the presidential election.

Last year, Minnesota’s annual day to promote online philanthropy raised $18.1 million for thousands of nonprofit organizations. As of midnight Thursday, it had raised an unofficial record $20.1 million during the 24-hour appeal, now in its eighth year. The old record was $18.3 million, set in 2014.

This year, the effort was marred by a technical failure on the GiveMn.org website from about 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. A backup site still allowed donors to search for nonprofits and complete secure credit card transactions, but it did not post up-to-date totals on how much each organization had raised.

With money accumulating in the dark, organizations had no idea how they were doing until the entire system went back online in the afternoon. That’s when Carol Stoddart, development director for the ACLU Minnesota, got surprising good news.

“One of my colleagues just burst into my office and said, ‘Carol said we’re at $50,000!’”

By the end of the day, nearly 1,100 individual donors had given $81,340.

“That’s pretty breathtaking for us,” said Stoddart, who said last year the ACLU raised $19,585 on the GiveMn.org platform. She chalked up this year’s success to the election.

“Based on campaign promises that the president-elect was making, we anticipate that he’s going to take actions that are definitely unconstitutional,” she said. “People are concerned. That’s what these numbers say, is that people really care, and they really want to be part of a solution.”

In first place was hunger relief organization Second Harvest Heartland with more than $313,000. Planned Parenthood of Minnesota, North Dakota and South Dakota was in second place, just ahead of Augsburg College. With more than $220,000 in contributions, the reproductive health provider performed well ahead of last year, when it raised $103,000 from 980 donors, and had attracted more than 2,400 donors — more individual donors than any other organization. A spokeswoman also said Planned Parenthood had also taken at least an additional $6,000 on its own website and had a matching grant.