Heinlein Publishing Services: "Tweetraising"

05 July 2009

"Tweetraising" - cause marketing

I am very interested in cause marketing.

Cause as related personally

As, I am now officially into my "second half" of life... being impactful, and doing things that are lasting and meaningful, have become much "front and center" in my thinking... really age has nothing to do with it. It's really about "distraction".
Life in my earlier years was certainly filled w distractions... thus I wander...

Cause as related to business

The question is...how do we make choices about "whom" we do business with?
I like this formula: "We do business with people that we KNOW, LIKE, and TRUST"
When sorting through the clutter of the marketing assaults on our person, cause is something that makes one stop to pause... and consider [that was really corny, sorry...]
Intrinsically, we do want to "do good"...well, many to most do...
If I can buy a product or service that both benefits me and helps someone else or a cause that I believe in...that makes me feel better about handing over the dough...

Tweetraising: The Potential For Charities On Twitter
by Leena Rao on July 5, 2009

Twitter has been hailed as an incredibly useful marketing tool for businesses and brands, both big and small, to disseminate information and engage with consumers on a massive scale. But what about non-profits?

Twitter, the current darling of the social media world, is increasingly being used by charities. In addition to building awareness, Twitter has potential to raise charitable contributions.

Twitter’s viral, real-time nature allows for a fast (and relatively low-cost) way to raise funds. Tweetsgiving, another Twitter-based charitable initiative raised over $10,000 in just 48 hours in November of 2008 to fund a new classroom for a school in Tanzania. Beth Kantor reports that she was able to raise over $3000 via Twitter in just 90 minutes.

Even on a smaller scale, there are some capabilities that Twitter provides on its platform that other social media outlets don’t have. For example, hashtags are one part of a fundraising effort on Twitter that can make it easy to search and identify a particular trend.

Some may argue that the thousands raised through social media sites doesn’t match the millions raised through traditional tactics, including direct mail and events. But most charities are relatively late-adopters to new technologies, and the success we have seen this early is probably a strong indication of the potential that is yet to be unharnessed. This isn’t to suggest that Twitter will replace conventional ways of fundraising, but it provides a low-cost, yet engaging way to diversify a charity’s fundraising efforts. And in this economy, diversification is too important to ignore.