Give fast

Epic Change raised over $10,000 in 48 hours to build a classroom in Tanzania.

Beth Kanter raised more than $2500 in 90 minutes for an organization for which she has long volunteered.

Here are a list of reflections about how to do this - most cites lead to blogs. There is a lot being written and posted on Facebook as well.

http://beth.typepad.com/beths_blog/2008/11/twitter-for-dummies-nominate-a-charity-to-receive-proceeds-i-nominated-one-of-the-first-charities-to.html

http://www.miss604.com/2008/11/happy-thanksgiving-and-tweetsgiving-2008.html

http://blog.socialactions.com/profiles/blogs/the-lend4health-journey-2

http://lend4health.blogspot.com/

http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/notes.php?id=638880510

http://www.fundraisingsuccessmag.com/story/story.bsp?var=story&sid=94532

http://philanthropy.com/giveandtake/index.php?id=687

What is my take on all this? I see it AT LEAST as one more example of something that might seem marginal moving into the middle. Think about the expectations that this kind of fundraising raises -

• Video, blogging, twitter, online payments, viral marketing, instant thank yous, etc as the minimal expected organization infrastructure;
  
• Community building (you can identify other donors, everyone blogs about it), instant infrastructure (giving managed by chip-in, Paypal enables the back office);
• Quick commitment - set a goal, reach it, move on;
• Little gifts - and lots of them - are the holy grail;
  
• Creativity matters - next year you'll need a new twist;
• Anyone at an organization might be the leader of your next campaign;

And then some other questions that just pop to mind?

• How do we understand this kind of giving in relationship to discussions about metrics and leverage and impact?
  
• What about privacy concerns - are there any?
  
• Is there any tracking of giving campaigns? Are data available from Twitter? Chipin? Paypal? And are these the new data sources for tracking giving?
  
• Do these kinds of campaigns signal anything to larger donors, the way GoogleFlu may signal pandemic outbreaks? Do they highlight new organizations to consider? New kinds of organizational capacity metrics to care about (how many twitter donors do you have? what kind of micro-philanthropy programs do you run?) Are they useful sources of news - beyond what they've already been shown to do in tragedies?
  

Tags: philanthropy, twitter, tweetsgiving, kanter, data