TweetmasFuture: Starting the Conversation

About two weeks, Epic Change ran a fundraising campaign called TweetsGiving, which focused specifically on encouraging the Twitterverse to help raise funds to build a school. In 2 days, they raised $11,131. Very cool.

After this campaign, Avi Kaplan posted the stats on how the campaign faired and what he learned from the event. This powerful example of transparency is a service to other organizations considering using Twitter to fundraise.

This, of course, sparked my interest. Digging in a little further, I found my way to Beth Kanter’s blog and her comments on how to improve similar campaigns and share that data. By participating in that conversation I thought it would be useful for ChristmasFuture to experiment with a Twitter fundraising campaign.

The reason for this campaign is twofold:

1. Raise money to help end poverty
2. Continue the experiment of using Twitter to fundraise (without being spammy or annoying) by sharing our strategy

So, starting on Dec. 16th, TweetmasFuture will launch, encouraging the Twitterverse to give someone they care about a gift on the ChristmasFuture website. Although the current page of TweetmasFuture is a little rough, I’ll be adding a search RSS to the sidebar soon and, more importantly, a live update that tracks progress towards our goal of raising $20k before Dec. 24th.

One of the challenges with this campaign is that other people will be giving on the site who aren’t associated with Twitter. This will be a challenge to precisely measure gifts on the site. The best way to do it is if people use their twitter handle in the From Name field. I’ll be using this blog to track things like velocity of the campaign, etc.

I would like to hear your thoughts on this idea and what you’d like to see on TweetmasFuture homepage. As you can imagine, a small non-profit like ours is strapped from time and resources (just like most other non-profits), so our experience should be relevant to many other organizations.

I’ll be connecting with some of ChristmasFuture’s supporters directly, asking them to help launch TweetmasFuture on the 16th.

What are your thoughts on TweetmasFuture? What statistics and metrics would you find useful?