On Friday, I got an invitation to "donate my status" on Facebook for a Get Out The Vote Rally on Facebook, a causes application. When you install, it will give Facebook permission to automatically change your status line to one of several get out the vote messages. When I installed there were 28,849 users on Facebook that had installed. I just checked and there are like 72,000.
This type of interaction design is perfect on facebook - doesn't require donation, easy to install and spread. And, I think once you've installed it, you don't get a million invitations - or at least I haven't yet.
If you want to know more about social media and the election, there's a compilation of examples of how social media is being used in the elections by Lauren-Glenn Davitian, CCTV Center for Media and Democracy. (You can read it here). Lucy Bernholz offers some brilliant reflection questions on what philanthropy can learn from politics.
Well off to turn Twittter avatar into the logo for VoteReport.
Hey online comm for a non-profit here. Does anyone know how this idea of "donating your status" can be taken and made specific to another cause? It'd be great to have our supporters on facebook all display the "is donating their status to" our cause for a day. Anyone know if this is possible or been done yet?
Posted by: Matt | November 04, 2008 at 09:53 AM