Updated 11/13/2012 at 5:38 p.m.
Welcome to school fundraising in the age of rage faces.
With some help from her parents, Ruby Knudson, 5, created a photo slideshow of memes to collect money for her elementary school’s fundraiser, an effort that brought in $1,000. The slideshow also went viral on Reddit and got so many views that it crashed the servers hosting the fundraising site, Ruby's dad, Nathan, wrote in an email to The Huffington Post.
The Poway, Calif., dad came up with the alternative fundraising idea when he learned that Ruby's school does not allow kids to go door-to-door asking for charity.
“Rather than do an hour of phone-sales with a script I thought maybe we could do something fun as a family that would give her a sense of not only hard work, but 'smart' work,” he wrote.
Along with the "smart" work came a pretty big lesson in crowdsourcing.
“She's learned that the computer is connected to real people and real things which can have a real impact,” Nathan wrote. “I'm trying to teach her that if you're following the crowd through life you're never going to be first to do anything.”
5 Year-Old Uses Memes For School Fundraiser
PHOTOS: Lacy and Nathan Knudson