I've come across two personal fundraising campaigns that use the metaphor of wishes and are aggressively incorporating social media techniques into their strategies. 

8 Wishes is a personal fundraising campaign launched by Paul Sanchez who is riding his bike around around the entire United States on behalf of kids with dyslexia (learning disabilities).   Paul has 8 wishes - he hopes to earn $1 million so that he can give 100 kids each $10,000 to use to go to college.  According to Liz Strauss, of the Successful Blog, in the week since his launch, he has received 15,000 hits and raised over $3,000 towards his goal from 123 contributors.    His deadline is Jan 10th, so check it out!  His campaign video is here.

If you could make one wish for the world, what would it be?  That's question the "Gifter Site, a series of experiments in social giving to change the world, is asking.  So, here is how it works.

You can post your wish as a comment over The Million Dollar Blog - the Internet Wishing Well, and for each comment they donate $1 to charity.   They are challenging people to make it a million dollar blog post, with 1 million comments. Here's a few of the wishes:

I wish that everyone can plant one tree. Big or small..it doesn’t matter…just plant one tree.

Stop the genocide in Darfur, that’d be foremost.

A better world for my children, and the children of everyone around the world.

What's your wish this holiday season?