I will be writing a personal thank you note to every single one of the 81 donors who generously contributed to the campaign to send two Cambodian young people to college. Thank you Steve Dembo!
I don't know Steve Dembo face-to-face. Somehow we follow each other on Twitter, mostly via our mutual connections to educational technology bloggers. Not only did Steve contribute to my campaign, but he was inspired to launch his own campaign to support Habitat for Humanity.
About a week ago, I saw Beth Kanter’s tweet about trying to raise money to send a Cambodian student to college. I had been about to buy a new t-shirt on Threadless, but instead made a donation to her cause. She made it as simple as possible. I just clicked “ChipIn!” and paid directly out of my PayPal account. And then I felt really good for the rest of the day.
It got me thinking though… The fact that she was able to send two children to collage through raising funds on her blog, facebook, YouTube, Twitter and other social sites really made a huge impression. I’ve built up a pretty decently sized social network online. How am I leveraging it to make a difference in the world?
So I decided that I was going to follow Beth’s example and begin a personal fund raising campaign for the holiday season. After a little soul searching, I decided to adopt Habitat for Humanity as the cause. Why? There’s a few reasons. The foremost reason is that my mother-in-law, 3 sisters-in-law and brother-in-law all were the beneficiaries of a Habitat house in Iowa City, so I’ve seen first hand just how incredible an organization it is. Their work has impacted millions of families both here in the US and overseas. In the wake of Katrina, Habitat has built over 1,100 homes in just a little over two years.
I wish you good luck in your campaign! I hope you'll blog about what you learn about implementing a personal fundraising campaign!
http://socialmarketing.blogs.com/
Thought you'd find this useful
Posted by: Yianni Garcia // socialmediaguy | November 06, 2007 at 06:42 AM