Beth Kanter and the Real-Time Social Web Make Fundraising History
On
Friday evening, I watched something amazing unfold online - all while
trying to get my kids into the bath and get their rooms ready for bed.
Saying things like, "Hang on guys, I'm trying to copy and paste some of
these tweets!" had little effect, but I couldn't help it. This was
exciting, powerful, historical - This was Beth Kanter at Gnomedex!
For me, it all started with a simple tweet from Robert Scoble providing a link to a Ustream.TV feed of Beth's presentation. Click, and I was watching Beth rocking the Gnomedex 8.0 crowd with her tales from the front lines of the nonprofit social web. She was discussing her fundraising efforts in 2006 and 2007 that were geared towards sending a Cambodian woman to college, and then it happened.
Her challenge was simple: Can this room of highly connected gnomedexers get 250 people to donate $10 by the end of the conference?
She tweeted this challenge
to the masses, and a few attendees kicked things off by donating
onstage. That's when the real-time social web flexed its muscles, and
the tweets, retweets, and donations began flying around the
Twitterverse.
At the conclusion of the 90-minute presentation,
$2,657 had been collected from 112 online donors (not to mention the
$902 in cash given onsite). The goal had been to reach $2,500 by the
end of the conference, and the real-time social web had done that (and
then some) in 90 minutes. Hello world, meet the future!
We already knew the social web could get things done, but Beth's successful experiment
demonstrated that it can be used to get things done RIGHT NOW. A well
connected online community can make things happen when called to
action, and nonprofits are in a great position to harness this power
for social change. Combined with an engaged online community, real-time
technologies like Twitter, Ustream.tv, and smart phones can be used as
an immediate system for change.
I'm glad Beth is our nonprofit tech ambassador, and that she continues to inspire anyone who will listen. I'm glad that Scoble, Chris Brogan, Danny Sullivan, Chris Pirillo
and the rest of the tech elite helped bring so much mainstream
attention to this cause. I'm glad nonprofits can use this as an example
of how emerging technology is changing fundraising forever.
In the time it took me to bathe my boys and put them to bed, a young student named Leng Sopharath was given the life-changing gift of education. That 90 minutes of furious tweeting, texting, and giving will ensure her housing, tuition, and medical bills are paid as she continues her college journey.
Is this a one-time thing that can only happen when well-connected geeks decide to make a difference, or can this be repeated by other nonprofits? I'm not sure, but I can't wait to find out. In the mean time, I'll be sure to read Because a Little Bug Went Ka-choo to my boys a few more times, and remind them that the butterfly effect actually has wings.