Cause Marketing Trend Watch
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The happy union of social media and cause marketing is not by any stretch new news. That said, there’s a lot of interesting stuff going on right now leveraging the considerable power of microsharing (I like this much better than “micro-blogging” and have Pistachio Consulting to thank for the coinage). Witness the whirlwind of fundraising excitement coming out of the South by Southwest conference (for non-digeratis, it’s a convergence in Austin TX of the music, entertainment and interactive worlds, “SXSW” if you’re a cool kid.)
The program that seems to be generating the most buzz (at least according to the non-stop chirping coming from my Tweetdeck) is the Social Media Smackdown, a challenge pitting power bloggers and celebrities against eachother in a race to raise funds for their respective charities. Meanwhile in Cincinnati, our client P&G was involved in a smackdown of their own: Digital Hack Night, a fundraiser for the Tide Loads of Hope disaster relief program (get the blow-by-blow from participant and master blogger David Armano here )
Real money is being raised through these efforts — the Tide hackathon raised $50,000 in just four hours, which was matched by P&G. Thanks to Twitter and other microsharing hubs, we can now fundraise at a blistering pace. The donations and pledges that used to take weeks to gather (remember collecting signatures and checks with an old-timey sign-up sheet for walkathons and the like way back in the dark ages of the late 20th century?) can now be collected in a matter of hours thanks to the exponential power of tweets and retweets.
I’ll keep watching this trend with great interest, and would love to hear about any other smart uses of Twitter in the fundraising space you might know of.
