For those of you who haven’t noticed, today’s happens to be Red Nose Day. Whilst Red Nose Day represents a chance for the less inhibited of us to do something extroverted in the name of charity, it got me to thinking about how the web has really helped advance the cause of charities by simplifying the process of raising and collecting money. And more than that, how the increasing popularity of social media technologies is going to act as a catalyst to drive this even further forward.
So, this week’s mail contains a couple of charitable examples and then something that I saw earlier this week which quite literally stopped me in my tracks. OK, the latter isn’t anything to do with charity, but it is about Social Media. Honest.
Oh, and many thanks to Stuart and Anthony for their poster ‘ambush’…
A
A waterfall starts with a drop of rain. http://www.justgiving.com/
Justgiving was founded in 1999 with a simple mission: to enable any charity, no matter how small, to use the web to raise money at no (or little) cost. With over 6.5 million users and £370 million raised for more than 6,000 charities, I think I would say that they have achieved this, no? And for those of you who want to see Just Giving in action, our indomitable Oscar could always use a few more pennies to support his Marathon fund-raising efforts (http://my.artezglobal.com/personalPage.aspx?SID=242480).
Proctor & Gamble raises money for charity be embracing social media http://adage.com/digital/article?article_id=134879
On Wednesday night, Proctor & Gamble paired 40 digital media and agency executives with 100 of its North American directors in a contest to sell Tide T-shirts for charity, as its much vaunted ‘Digital Hack Night’ became a four hour reality show aired largely in social media. For an upfront spend of $4,000, P&G managed to sell 2,000 T-shirts at $20 a pop for charity, while exploring the top ten trending topics on Twitter in the process. That’s a tenfold ROI. I love this approach to educating clients about social media, by capitalising on natural competitiveness and making a significant return at the same time. Why didn’t we think of it?
Jaws. The atonement. http://www.churaumi-hakken.jp/p3/
Jaws was a groundbreaking film. Not only was it a box-office smash, but it also created a generation of people who were unable to swim in deep water without encountering a spine numbing fear about what lay in wait below. Anyway, this site, which promotes an aquarium in Okinawa, uses user-generated videos from You-Tube in a way that is quite frankly one of the best uses of Flash I have seen in ages. It takes a while to load up, but the effect is worth the wait.