Last December, Susan Reynolds, an artist and social media maven, was diagnosed with Breast cancer. She announced on her blog, "I use Twitter to fight Cancer" and without any formal blogger relations campaign, well-known and influential bloggers blogged about her situation and changed their avatars to include peas. Through Connie Reece's visionary leadership, the community rallied and the "Frozen Pea Fund" was started. Susan continues to share her experience at her blog and through twitter.
The pioneering efforts of the Frozen Pea Fund continue to inspire other women to fight against breast cancer. While breast cancer doesn’t run in her family, Leah Jones has just launched her training for her 3 Day Breast Cancer Walk. She wanted to participate in the challenge to honor her friends, that she is close to.
Every October, all of the blogs in my blogosphere go pink and my friends sign up for different types of Breast Cancer fundraiser. I go from blog to blog to blog, making $18 donations to support each of them in the greater fight to find a cure and raise awareness. Even at 31, I have waited outside of hospital doors for peers who were getting the news (so far, all clear).
As she writes on her blog, in a post titled "If you need me, I'll be walking .." she's now taking her activism offline.
I was selected to be one of the Edelman team members for the Susan G. Komen 3-Day in Atlanta. I have a pretty intense training schedule over the next ten weeks, so if you need me, I'll be walking.
Her other motivation is an opportunity to experiment with Twitter and blogging to see just how much her community can raise for this cause. I hope she will blog some of her lessons learned too. Just today, I got a Twitter question from DeafMom asking for advice. (I pointed her to my personal fundraising case study)
The next thing now is to add the new AdWords-Style Widget from the Social Actions folks. The widget automatically identifies the keywords on any page and lists social change campaigns related to the stuff you're writing about. Here's a widget I created for Breast Cancer social change campaigns.
Wow Beth - I really like how you weaved this post together and found connections between the FrozenPeaFund, Leah Jone's campaign, & the new social actions widget. We're really all in this together!
Posted by: Joe Solomon | August 20, 2008 at 03:50 PM
Great inspiration, Beth. I'll be following Leah's progress. One of the things we have decided to do for the Frozen Pea Fund is to encourage as many people as possible to get involved with walks, marathons, races and events for breast cancer awareness and fundraising. We'll be making some donations to friends of our online community who make the commitment to projects like this. At lunch today I met someone associated with the Susan G. Komen foundation -- so it's a nice treat to wind up my day reading about Leah's training for the walk.
Posted by: Connie Reece | August 20, 2008 at 07:35 PM
Wow! Beth, I'm so flattered that you wrote about my walk. Today blew me away. Despite spending the last year singing the praises of Twitter and using it to raise funds for Pilcrow last year, I've never been on the raising side for something like this.
In one day I raised over $1000 with my community. I'll be writing more about the training and fund raising experience and will check out that widget.
Thanks for the great post!
Posted by: Leah | August 20, 2008 at 07:41 PM
Hey Beth, Thanks for mentioning the new social actions widget.
Did you see that we got booted off Digg? Apparently nonprofit technology doesn't count as technology -- according to the Digg community. I'm always surprised when I step out of my nptech bubble to see how much disinterested the for profit tech community is in what we're doing in nptech.
Next month's web 2.0 NYC will hopefully change my mind. I like to think that techies of all stripes would be interested in how technology can be leveraged for dogooder projects.
Good to know we have a community unto ourselves for the discussion -- end rant.
-Peter
Posted by: Peter Deitz | August 21, 2008 at 07:15 AM