A Geek's Reflections on Personal Fundraising Via Blog, Twitter, and Facebook

On September 3, I blogged and tweeted about a story about two interesting social media fundraising opportunities in Africa.  One of them was charity: water, a non-profit bringing safe, clean drinking water to people in developing nations that had launched a September Birthday campaign. (Hat tip Brett Meyer at NTEN) They asked everyone born in September to give up birthday presents and ask their friends and family for donations to build water wells in Ethiopia instead.  More information here.

I tweeted the link one of my twitter followers, Paul Young decided to give personal fundraising with social media a whirl.   According to this post on Mashable, Paul's September 18th birthday fundraiser was a success!  He has raised over $800.

Even better, he shared a detailed analysis of what worked and what didn't.  His key takeaways:

• You’ll have a few super-strong relationships, and these must reside in the real world (your family and best mates) - this is where most of the money came from
• Twitter is a great way to drive people to take action - yes I tweeted many times (up to 20) and I ‘bribed’ followers a little by giving shout outs to those who donated, but $4.50 per click through is great!
• Facebook ‘friends’ are just weak ties - 77 people left me Facebook wall comments saying happy birthday, 34 of them clicked through to my charity page, 1 donated.
• A facebook status is less ‘active’ than a Twitter message - maybe a lot more people are on Facebook, but they’re paying less attention
• The new Facebook design may have confused people - it’s quite possible people missed the link, though 33 of the 34 who did didn’t do anything about it
• A bigger network = bigger results - Pete Cashmore of Mashable fame shares my birthday (and dang, he’s 2 years younger!) and his 12,000 Twitter followers have helped him raise over three times as much money so far (but granted, people aren’t going to throw a thousand bucks at me in order to suck up :))

Paul is hoping to make his goal of $1,000 and still has a week left to do so.  You can donate here.

Comments

[Lindsay Lebresco]

Ah- I must be one of Paull's best mates in the real world because I donated to this great cause- good to know! :) And it wasn't just because Paull's great and I couldn't figure out what to get him for his birthday but it's also because I'm a bleeding heart and who could resist supporting Charity: water? I gotta laugh that Paull turned it into a case study in social media- he really is a geek!

[Rachel Beer]

Thanks Beth - and Paul - for some really useful insights.