Work fast. Do good. Invite everybody. Mash up these appealingly simple strategies with a Web 2.0 tool like Twitter, the popular microblogging platform, and you wind up with something called a Twestival.
During the world’s first Twestival, on Feb. 12, near-simultaneous fundraisers took place in pubs and clubs in 202 cities around the globe. The buzz began building a couple of weeks earlier, thanks to chatter in the Twitterverse. (For anyone who’s managed to miss the latest Internet phenomenon, Twitter allows people to post short updates, called tweets, which others can subscribe to and read.)
Twestival attendees got to meet and greet the real people behind the avatars whose mini-messages they follow. But this was more than socializing. Ticket sales and online donations generated more than $250,000 to support the nonprofit Charity: Water, whose mission is to provide clean drinking water in the developing world.
Twestival organizer Amanda Rose, a Canadian events consultant living in London, volunteered to organize the event on a few weeks’ notice to demonstrate the power of microphilanthropy. “I’m not a charity thumper,” she insists. “This just seems like the right thing to do.” During tough economic times, she adds, “we are going to be reliant on microdonations. I wanted people to give what they could, even if it’s only two dollars, and let them see how it adds up.”
Picking just the right cause is critical. “It had to be a simple and worthwhile concept,” Rose says, “so the Twitter community could get behind it.” Clean drinking water turns out to be an ideal concept to convey in 140 characters or less (the maximum length of a tweet). What’s more, Charity: Water is a nonprofit “that really understands social media and how to engage this crowd,” Rose says. The organization invites donors to post their personal stories about philanthropy on its Web site and uses Google Earth to show the locations of wells it builds in the developing world.
Conversations that start with a few words on Twitter often jump to blogs and YouTube. Rose says this shows the viral power of Web 2.0 tools to connect and engage people. “It’s the conversation that gets people.”
Instead of taking a top-down approach, Rose favors crowd-sourcing. That means engaging local volunteers in every site. “I want to bring huge awareness,” she says, “but decentralize it.” Her strategy: provide event guidelines to ensure consistency across geographies, then leave the nitty-gritty to locals. Naturally, she arranged to track donations online, giving Twitterers something else to chatter about.
Every Twestival had its own vibe. New Yorkers raised $24,000 while schmoozing in a nightclub. Meanwhile, in Dubai, the tweet-up raised $400 at a beach party. “That reflects the online Zeitgeist,” Watson says. “Nobody’s experience online is the same as anyone else’s.”
London’s Twestival was a huge draw: 700 tickets sold out in two hours, and donations topped $8,000. Dhaka, Bangladesh, raised almost nothing, but was still a success from the organizer’s perspective. “I just wanted them to participate,” Rose says. “The next time it happens, the momentum will be huge.”
Read more stories by Suzie Boss.