Social Media: Making an Impact |

Social Media: Making an Impact November 27, 2008

Posted by novelistkat in : How you can help, Philosophies , trackback

Social media is changing the face of philanthropy on a daily basis; Tom Watson calls it CauseWired, we call it a Giving Revolution.

November 17, 2008: An event was created on Facebook encouraging people across the world to “update their Facebook status for Laura’s House”. Laura’s House is an agency in Orange County that offers comprehensive domestic violence services. The Event was to increase awareness of domestic violence against woman and to raise donations—as little as $12.50, or what it costs to see the new Bond movie and get popcorn—to help shelter women and children. 53 people “attended” the event and even more updated their statuses on Facebook, Twitter and MySpace and encouraged their friends to do the same.

Thanksgiving 2008 (November 25-27, 2008): A website popped up called Tweetsgiving. The goal of this site was to use Twitter to raise $10,000 in 48 hours and build a classroom in Tanzania. At the time of this writing, they are 75% of the way to their goal. Every $10 buys a brick! Tweetsgiving is connected to Epic Change. Epic Change tells the stories of people who are in need, helps them get resources to over their situation and then shares their success with the world; a powerful website making a powerful statement through social media.

At GiveCheerfully we believe that social media in its many forms is an awesome tool that can help any nonprofit organization grow in ways they never dreamed possible. Of course not all charities are as bold as Epic Change or as connected as Laura’s House. That’s where we come in. We want to help facilitate charities using social media as a way to gain more awareness, donors, volunteers, resources and publicity.

Right now we’d like to introduce our ALPHA PHASE of the GiveCheerfully site. We had hoped to enter beta by summer 2009, but due to some brilliant ideas on the parts of our volunteer development team (Jerrett Fowler, Kit Young & Zach Crockett) we believe we can bring out an ALPHA PHASE as soon as January of next year. The ALPHA PHASE will be a very small scale version of what we envision for GiveCheerfully, but will still allow charities to begin a profile and start interacting with donors and volunteers immediately. If we can raise $2000 by the end of 2008 we can make this a reality.

So what can you do to be part of the Giving Revolution?

If you are involved with a charity right now, have them fill out our charity submission form and email it to info@givecheerfully.com. All charities will be listed on the website and contacted to be our first Alpha testers! All 501©3s are welcome.
Donate. Help us reach our goal of $2000 so we can help charities across the country start accessing the potential of social media for their cause.
Spread the word! If you are already using social media, join our cause on Facebook, follow our founder on Twitter, subscribe to our RSS feed, tell your friends about our site. Remember, every action, no matter how small, is still an action.