The Future of Learning in a Networked World: Reflections From My Session

Leo Reynolds

The Future of Learning in Networked World is billed as a traveling open space conference.  It is taking place online with people from all over the world and there is a group on the grown in Southeast Asia (I so wish I could have gone.)   Some of the group members include Janet Hawtin, Leigh Blackall, Alexander Hayes and Nancy White (whose session I think I missed because of time zone dyslexia)

I stayed up last night for a discussion about fundraising on social networking sites.   You'll find the slides, a recording, and notes on the FLNW blog.   Nancy White asked some great questions that lead to some good reflections.

• Comfort:   Personal fundraising takes a degree of comfort to put yourself out there and ask people for money.  Some people don't like to do it.  Nancy equated it to door knocking campaigns.

• Donor Fatigue:   How often can you ask before people get burned out by it?

The second point is something I really fretted about before launching the most recent campaign.  Would writing about what I am learning about social fundraising (as well as hitting up people for money) would that alienate at some point?  Where's that line? 

Alan Levine shared his thoughts in the comments of another post on this issue:

This year I was acutely aware of the spot you can put people in, like the reason you know Dave is contacting you in October is because he wants some $$ for the ______ charity bike ride. It's not a bad thing, but I wanted to give my contacts a break.

I was going to pony up the minimum amount myself ($1000) but got lucky and got a one day software review gig that more than got that amount.

But in December I thought, "hey all you did was raise the minimum". So I decided to go for mostly strangers, doing one blog post and sending out a few twitter messages:

Wow, what a response- I raised my total funds raised to nearly $1600, and a number of them were from people I've never had contact with.

For more resources on this topic, see my personal fundraising wiki.

Comments

[Juliet Sallette]

Great post. Brilliant summation of how to make social media work for a worthy cause. This beats writing out 100 or so cards and sending them to your friends and collegues, asking for money. If you can help out a charity and save time in the process, what could be better? Now the fun part will be learning how to implement what you discussed in your post. I will let you know how I fare with my next charity outreach effort. Thanks for sharing.
Juliet

[Beth]

Juliet:

Thanks for commenting. I agree. Before I started fundraising online, I used create "culture kits" based on items I purchased from Cambodians - for example - an unpainted monkey mask. I would create kid's packets, then sell them to other adoptive parents or schools - all proceeds going to the Sharing Foundation. It would hours and hours of time!

Good luck with your campaign and let me know how it goes.