
Note from Beth: I was lucky enough to connect with Julio Vasconcellos when we wrote blog posts on similar topics several weeks ago and he was kind enough to assist me with the birthday campaign.
The week we launched TwitCause, TechCrunch called us a “Causes for Twitter,” today our platform for supporting nonprofit causes on Twitter has surpassed 500,000 followers, spotlighted dozens of nonprofits, raised tens of thousands of dollars, and won the hearts of celebrities, nonprofits, and caring Twitterers.
Although
we’ve come a long way from our early days, we haven’t always gotten
things right from the get-go, and we’ve learned a lot along the way by
listening to our supporters and doing a whole lot of experimenting.
Today, I’d like to share some of those lessons learned with you.
For
those unfamiliar with TwitCause, we provide a way for Twitterers to
support nonprofit causes they care about. We do this by highlighting
(on Twitter and on our website) a cause every week and encouraging
people to follow it, tweet its message, and consider making a donation.
We also partner with respected brands
willing to donate to causes as supporters tweet updates that spread the
cause’s message. TechCrunch’s original piece is a good overview, as are
these posts on Experience Project, the company behind TwitCause.
With no further adieu, here are 5 lessons we’ve learned on the road to 500,000 followers:
1. Keep your Message Simple and Short: The
beauty of Twitter is that it forces even the most verbose of us to be
succinct. If you can’t summarize your organization’s mission in 140
characters, try again until you can. In this day and age of short
attention spans, it’s critical to grab attention with a short and clear
message. We had to do this for TwitCause despite the hidden complexity
of our product, and I think that the simplicity of our offering enabled
so many people to grasp the concept quickly, rally behind it, and
spread it to their friends.

2. Provide Immediate Results from an Action: People like to see an immediate and direct result from their own action, social media users have an even stronger desire for this immediacy. My friend Jessica Jackley who co-founded Kiva told me early on that one of the reasons Kiva works is that you see the exact goat herder you’re helping with your loan (not to mention read his story and look at his pictures). Not only does that provide immediacy, but it creates a fun experience which makes participants want to keep coming back to Kiva and tell their friends about it. DonorsChoose has successfully tapped into the same pathos by allowing you to pick the specific school project you are helping to fund. From our TwitCause experience, we’ve seen orders-of-magnitude more tweeting and retweeting of a cause’s message when supporters know that for each tweet they publish, $1 will be directly donated to the cause by a sponsoring brand rather than a delayed and indirect payoff when their tweets are destined at only calling on others to consider making a donation.

3. Enable People to Pre-Commit their Support: We’re all busy. As much as we want to visit a site once a week and support that week’s cause, even the most dedicated of us will forget once in a while or lose interest over time. That’s why allowing people to pre-commit their future support is a great way to enable supporters to continuously show their support and for organizations to maintain a steady level of active supporters. This approach has been successfully employed by nonprofits that ask donors to subscribe to a monthly donation amount which is automatically charged to their credit cards, without necessitating them to remember the donation every month and go through the process of donating repeatedly. At TwitCause, we’ve found great success with our TwitCause Stars program, which enables supporters to pre-commit to support the weekly featured TwitCause by tweeting a message and following that cause. We do this automatically on their behalf, once they’ve authorized us to do so via the Twitter API. We have nearly 1,000 people that have done this, including major celebrities like Alyssa Milano and Shannon Elizabeth.
4. Don’t Expect People to Pay: I’ve written before about my belief that social media users are great for spreading a message and awareness, but largely ineffective for raising large sums of money. Generally speaking, very few people actually donate, and those that do make comparatively small contributions. There are a few notable exceptions (Obama anyone?), but they are very few and far between and often are not pure-social-media plays. Causes on Facebook has raised a lot of money in aggregate, but a pittance on a per-user basis. If you keep this fact in your fundraising strategy, it’ll save you a lot of heartache later on.
5. Do Expect Brands to Pay: If
you believe my claim that social media is a great way to generate a lot
of attention (we’ve reached tens of millions of people with TwitCause),
and you agree that brands are willing to pay to get attention, you can
see how marrying the two in a clean manner can be incredibly powerful.
Think of the #beatcancer campaign sponsored by ebay and MillerCoors, the recent Pepsi giving campaign on Facebook, and countless others,
and you’ll see what I’m talking about. What’s critical here is that the
campaign not turn into a thinly-disguised advertisement and in fact is
primarily focused on benefiting the social cause, but allotting the
brand to respectfully participate in the conversation in an authentic
fashion. TwitCause partnered with Häagen-Dazs to raise money for honey
bee research (a cause Häagen-Dazs has long championed), partnered with
Lion’s Gate's movie “Precious” to raise money for literacy (the film has a strong message about literacy as hope), and with pro-biotic brand Attune
to support Celiac Disease (the Attune Bar is great for digestive
health). All campaigns raised thousands of dollars for the nonprofits
(100% of proceeds going to the nonprofit) and spread the causes’
messages to millions of people.
I'd love to hear in the comments
which of these you agree or disagree with as well as what other
"lessons learned" you would add to the list.

Julio Vasconcellos manages TwitCause for the Experience Project and advises nonprofits on social media strategy and tactics. This post was originally published on Julio's blog, The Armchair Founder.
Thanks for the ideas. We have just started to uncover all the avenues social media can take our organization and know there is so much more to learn. Keep sharing!
Posted by: Awareness Home Funding | January 26, 2010 at 08:15 AM
great post!
Posted by: TFrankfurt | January 26, 2010 at 09:41 AM
Wow! This seems like such a boon for the nonprofit world and its donors. Corporations can not only donate to their favorite nonprofit now, but can get some tangible publicity in return. Are corporations/brands social media savvy enough to realize the benefits of this model?
Posted by: Elena S. | January 26, 2010 at 12:23 PM
Thanks for the great post. I am a fan of TwitCause, since I believe it is an interesting model for ‘giving’ in this day and age. They have a really promising product that can make a HUGE impact since it is highly-visible and it makes it easy for people like you and me to help others and engage with causes.
Posted by: Irit Epelbaum | January 26, 2010 at 12:34 PM
Everybody Wins! USA was a featured TwitCause last fall in partnership with the Lionsgate Films movie Precious. They were easy to collaborate with and enlisted celebrities like Shannon Elizabeth and Alyssa Milano. In just one week, the TwitCause campaign generated millions of impressions, over 600 new Twitter followers and articles in the Chronicle of Philanthropy and Huffington Post. Social media efforts like TwitCause are an extremely important awareness and relationship-building strategy for us. It enables us to demonstrate that we are both a leading voice on the importance of reading to children, and a vibrant, growing national organization that is an ideal partner.
Posted by: Rich Greif | January 26, 2010 at 12:52 PM
Thanks Julio,
A great post, especially with regard to the role that brands can play to enable social change. I work both with large brands and non-profits and the ways in which their mutuals interests can be served are only just starting to merge. Fundamental to brands is the realization that goodwill is readily earned when contribution is made to the greater good. Fundamental to the non-profit world is an adoption of a for profit mentality that empowers them to leverage the dynamics of the private sector for the greater good. Congratulations on enabling both of these with TwitCause. Truly meaningful and inspiring work.
Best, Simon Mainwaring
Posted by: Simon Mainwaring | January 26, 2010 at 01:31 PM
Hello! I really loved this post. As a nonprofit fundraiser in DC, I have thought a lot about what to expect from people when looking at and using social media as a way to raise awareness.
I think you are 100% right when you say NOT to expect money. it is an important component to your strategy, and ultimately to the success of your program to have REALISTIC expectations of your donors. I really love your work and commend you!
Posted by: Beth Oppenheim | January 26, 2010 at 01:42 PM
Attune Foods partnered with Experience Project and Twitcause to leverage our partnership with the Celiac Disease Foundation and help raise awareness of and funding to support Celiac Disease.
The promotion was a great success for Attune in reaching our target for the promotion (Celiacs) who rallied around the promotion to support a cause near and dear to them. Attune and CDF reached thousands of celiacs and over a million Celiac supporters in support of better digestive health.
Our conclusion was that Twitcause can be an incredible platform for brands to authentically leverage non-profit partnerships through social media. Attune is a small brand, but we're very passionate about trying to deliver better digestive health to consumers. This cause aligned perfectly with the CDF - and Twitcause making for a really great partnership.
Posted by: Daniel Wiser | January 26, 2010 at 01:46 PM
Great post - expectations of who will pay (brands, not people) - and why they would pay also sheds light on which brands may want to get into the game. Those that align their giving/social good with their business model. http://bit.ly/6dnb6b Great job.
Posted by: jennifer aaker | January 26, 2010 at 02:35 PM
Thanks all for the supporting comments (nice to see some friends in the thread!).
One interesting theme I'm reading here is the relationship between brands and causes. First off, I think that brands are starting to realize the power that aligning themselves with a cause can have, as long as that alignment is genuine and authentic. It can be a great positive for employees that can be proud of their company doing good things, and it can also help to generate goodwill with consumers if done correctly.
We are very conscious of issues around "cause washing" and try to foster an interaction that is genuine for all. We want to find brands that truly support the causes that they are sponsoring - for example, in Attune's example above, their product helps those with Celiac Disease (and more broadly looking to improve digestive health) and therefore having a close tie to organizations that represent those constituents can be mutually beneficial. Häagen-Dazs also donated nearly $10k through TwitCause and Experience Project to research into Colony Collapse Disorder - a phenomenon that is threatening the honey bee population. Häagen-Dazs depends on honey bees for some of its ingredients and thus has a true interest in this kind of environmental research (in fact they had previously already donated $500k to research).
Currently one of our priorities is getting in front of socially responsible brands that want to support causes through TwitCause. We're able to reach nearly 2 million people through our network of TwitCause Stars, so that's a pretty compelling value proposition both for the nonprofits and the brands! We're very optimistic and trying to learn as we grow.
Thanks for the comments and feedback!
Posted by: Julio Vasconcellos | January 26, 2010 at 06:40 PM
Hi. I want to clarify, per Beth's comment about Kiva, that the photo of a goat herder might be the person you are helping, but it's very unlikely. A recent NYT article about Kiva clarified that funds are pooled and invested and eventually distributed to qualifying projects as KIVA sees fit. This is a piece of transparency that is important to all of us who give to organizations like this. Also, if you care only about goat herders, there is no way to specify this so that your funds only go to them. Feedback? I would be happy to see further clarification.
Posted by: Bev Freeman | January 27, 2010 at 11:40 AM
Julio, thanks for this article. It's an incredibly valuable outlet, and one that bears consideration when outlining a marketing campaign strategy for a brand. This is a great way of leveraging social media for the good of both a cause and the funding company, though your comment on authenticity is an absolutely required component to make it both worthwhile and effective.
Posted by: Rebecca | January 27, 2010 at 09:41 PM