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Last August, I saw the impact of Twitter's velocity first-hand with a fundraising experiment. I was able to raise $2,500 in 90 minutes at Gnomedex. I wondered whether or not those results would be replicable? Right before Thanksgiving, the TweetsGiving effort helped Epic Change raise over $10,000 in 48 hours to build a classroom in Tanzania. As Lucy Bernholz notes, this might be one more example of fundraising on Twitter is less marginal and moving to the middle.
Lucy points to some implications for organizations to consider:
- Video, blogging, twitter, online payments, viral marketing,
instant thank yous, etc as the minimal expected organization
infrastructure;
- Community building (you can identify other
donors, everyone blogs about it), instant infrastructure (giving
managed by chip-in, Paypal enables the back office); - Quick commitment - set a goal, reach it, move on;
- Little gifts - and lots of them - are the holy grail;
- Creativity matters - next year you'll need a new twist;
- Anyone at an organization might be the leader of your next campaign;
One thing I might add is the importance of community building or rather network building. You don't go into using a Twitter strategy without having built up a little social capital or as Tara Hunt calls "Whuffie." I also wonder about the effectiveness of fundraising on Twitter and more and more organizations or individuals start doing it?
Let's take a brief look of the history of fundraising and lessons learned using Twitter drawing from my experience and those of others. If you know of campaigns and lessons learned that haven't been included, please leave a comment:
August 2007
I launched a campaign to raise money and get t-shirts donated for the Cambodian Bloggers Summit. I send updates on my progress on Twitter and noticed that everytime I twittered an update (not even a direct ask), I would receive donations. What seem to work was:
- Some influential people responding publically that they had donated
- My friends responding with public questions about what else was needed or suggesting fundraising strategies
- Private, personalized messages, not mass emails
The last few donations that put this campaign over the top came from Justin Kownack who paid it forward from his own group donation experiment using Twitter as a test of good deeds.
October 2007
This campaign was for $1,000 to send a young Cambodian woman, Leng Sopharath, to college. Chris Brogan and 81 other Twitter users helped reached this goal with small gifts in 24 hours. In fact, the campaign went over goal and we able to raise enough money to send another young person to college. What I learned from this campaign that it is important to get help from influencers on Twitter and that inbetween campaigns if you cultivate your network, the donations will not be a one-time only thing.
December 2007
On December 2, 2007, the first Frozen Pea Friday Campaign on Twitter Launched. It raised $3,500 in 15 hours. This campaign was a community-generated effort - spearheaded by Connie Reece and came from people who knew of Susan Reynolds fight with breast cancer and rallied behind her. As an outside observer, the lessons that I took away from this effort were:
- Having people change their avatar to a pea photo gave a visual clue to the campaign and helped it spread.
- This was the first time I observed the use of "retweeting" a fundraising message
- The short time period helped build momentum and a forward moving campaign that people wanted to be a part of.
- There were a number of social media influentials who reached out to their networks helping to contributing to a community culture of giving on Twitter
Connie Reece shared some insights in this interview and you find more links to case studies and post campaign reflections here.
January 2008
As the first place winner in the America's Giving Challenge for Global Causes, I use several twitter strategies. I held a one-day retweet rally during the midpoint of the long campaign to spread the word. In reflecting on this now, it is important to make sure that your supporters are doing the retweeting and that you're not overdoing it on your Twitter account or you risk annoying people.
I also learned that one-on-one donor solicitation techniques can also work and some of the challenges of being able to track the velocity or flow of networked donations. What is missing is some software or features that track the flow of your donations, almost like doing a
