Social media meets fundraising

Posted January 10th, 2007 at 3:11 pm by Nicki Dugan, Blog Editor

 5 Comments / Filed in: Cool Stuff, Yahoo! For Good

We’ve noticed a recent trend that occurs in the final days of the year. It’s precipitated by the “Crap-Did-I-Give-Enough-to-Charity-This-Year?” frenzy. Those mindful of the impending tax season suddenly realize it’s their last chance to make contributions for the year — and a good majority fire up web browsers to beat the deadline.

Yahoo! for Good recognized this dash to donate last year and inaugurated Cyber Giving Week, creating a donation microsite with tools, calculators, and news about tax breaks. With our partner Network for Good, we helped facilitate nearly $5 million in last-minute charitable contributions.

For Cyber Giving Week 2006, we teamed up with Network for Good again — this time with a social media twist. Inspired by bloggers who’ve generated loyal communities around everything from parenting to cooking, photography to technology, we created a tool called a “charity badge.”

This widget allows publishers to not only wear their philanthropic causes on their proverbial blogger sleeves, it invites readers to make donations to those organizations. To create the badge, publishers simply upload a photo and/or video (using Jumpcut’s free editing tools), insert text, and select a charity from among the more than 1 million supported by Network for Good. Yahoo! provided a little extra incentive for philanthropic procrastinators: a matching grant of $50,000 for the top-producing badge by the end of 2006.

We weren’t exactly sure what would happen with these badges. Would they take off, like MyBlogLog widgets? Would they become another piece of sidebar clutter, or would they actually drive action by others? The experiment was a nice success, proving that social media can also be a powerful fundraising vehicle. Hundreds of people created badges for such personalized causes as Transverse Myelitis Association, Anacostia Watershed Society, and Mata Amritanandamayi Center. The badges became subtle extensions of the publishers’ bios, revealing allegiances that might otherwise remain quiet and unnoticed, but which can say so much about a person.

Beth Kanter of Beth’s Blog raised $49,537 from 745 donors, earning our matching grant for the Sharing Foundation, a nonprofit that provides support for orphaned and seriously disadvantaged children in Cambodia. Like all of the charity badge creators, Beth’s tie to The Sharing Foundation is intensely personal — she adopted two Khmer children.

Beth’s badge is now up to $53,137 (at press time) — and that’s the point. These badges live on long after tax-deduction season comes to an end. To set up your badge, go here. It’ll take you less than five minutes and make you look, feel, and smell good.

And to all you Yahoo! 360° and MySpace users out there: We’re still working on compatibility, but you can set up an email signature link in the meantime.

Here’s further blog discussion:

• Katya’s Non-Profit Marketing Blog
• Guy Kawasaki’s blog
• Read/WriteWeb
• BlogHer
• Spare Change
• Nonprofit Blog Exchange

Nicki Dugan
Editor, Yodel Anecdotal

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5 Comments Add your own

Beth | January 10th, 2007 at 3:38 pm

One lesson learned is not to take down your badge right away. I’m really delighted that it behaves like the energizer bunny! Thank you again Yahoo for your support of the Sharing Foundation. The money will truly change the lives of many children in Cambodia!

Drew Meyers | January 10th, 2007 at 9:18 pm

Nicki-
Wow- very cool – I wish I had known about this sooner. I think I’ll be adding this to my blog this year (will del.icio.us this post right now). You should have told me about this at Blog Business Summit :)

Mindy | January 12th, 2007 at 2:19 pm

Thank you–I now have pepperoni on my monitor. I just about choked when I hovered on the parenting link and saw my site! Eeeee! Thanks for the link love.

Mohan Ram | January 30th, 2007 at 1:48 am

Very useful info. Great job by the right thinking people to inspire the kind hearted souls.

In India we started one NGO in the name of Humanitarian Aid Foundation, at Hyderabad, mainly with the idea of inspiring the salaried employees to make regular contribution every month. We conduct regular Charity Programs to serve the needy Visually, Physically and Mentally challenged people and also various Orphanages and Old age Homes in and around the City of Hyderabad in India. The details can be seen in our website:
http://www.humanitarian-aid-foundation.blogspot.com/

The main mission of our Organization is to inspire people to spend some portion of their revenue regularly for some Charity purpose or the other either directly or indirectly.

Your unit is doing a fantastic job in reminding the people on the importance of the charity.

God bless you and your team to continue this noble job.

P.Mohan Ram

shre dutt aai trust,nadiad.(gujarat) | August 2nd, 2007 at 4:06 am

we the dutt aai trust kindly request you, if you have any grant policy for our ngo trust and old age house, day care centre, and drug addicted hospital. our trust is regestered trust and our regestered no is ( F/548/kheda/4-1-91) so if you want to give grant and suport our trust and give help needy people. so please give us your grant application or your website for on line apply. because of that we go forward. our trust purchase a land for build old age home, day care centre, and drug addicted hospital. so we need money to construct building.

Thankyou.