Every TWTRCON DC 09 attendee to receive a $5 DonorsChoose.org giving card.
When we were working on TWTRCON SF, Stefanie Michaels (@adventuregirl) connected us to the team driving social media campaigns for Operation Smile (@operationsmile). The result was 140smiles.org, a Twitter-based fund-raising campaign that was launched at the TWTRCON SF pre-party and has already raised the money to help 48 children born with facial deformities. (Please go to 140smiles.org to help us reach our goal of 140 operations!)
Working with the Operation Smile team gave us a lot of insight into how creative non-profit marketers are, and how much traditional businesses and other types of organizations can learn from the not-for-profit world. We also realized that conferences–with all of the buzz that is created around the event–are a perfect opportunity to help create publicity for a non-profit cause.
We are really pleased that DonorsChoose.org has agreed to be the non-profit partner for TWTRCON DC 09. We were introduced to DonorsChoose.org, an online charity that connects donors to classrooms in need, by our keynote speaker, Craig Newmark. It’s a great concept: teachers post information about projects for which they need supplies or materials; donors select the projects they want to fund. Over the coming weeks, we are going to be working with the DonorsChoose.org team to develop a focused fund-raising campaign that will attempt to leverage the collective social networks of TWTRCON DC attendees in order to increase awareness and raise funds for this cause.
As part of this campaign, every TWTRCON DC attendee will receive a $5 DonorsChoose.org giving card with their registration.
You will receive your giving card when you pick up your badge on October 22. We’re still working on the details of the campaign itself, but we’re hoping that, if we organize all attendees to use their giving card and send tweets about the campaign at the same time, we will not only tell a lot of other people about the campaign, but we may even see the campaign trend on Twitter.
The goal is to learn something about using Twitter as a platform to promote awareness, all while having fun and helping out some classrooms in need, too.
If you have any ideas on how we can build a really effective campaign around this idea, let us know!
