Editor’s Note: When I met Estrella Rosenberg April 8 at the Nonprofit Technology Conference, she told me about the Foursquare 100×100 campaign to launch two days later. No one had used Foursquare in this way previously, and I immediately knew she was on to a breakthrough idea. I asked her to send me a writeup once it was over, and this is her guest post below.

When April 1st rolled around I had been investigating how non-profits use Foursquare and brainstorming how they could  use it for a couple of months. Although not a direct method of fundraising my thoughts were still along those lines…and then a question popped into my head. Could Foursquare be used for awareness and advocacy?

1 in 100 children are born with a heart defect. My two nonprofits Big Love Little Hearts and One Hundred Squared serve the Congenital Heart Defect (CHD) community. When was the 100th day of the year? It happened to be nine days later, April 10th. My next question was: “could I come up with a campaign in nine days, launch it and have it be successful?”  I had no idea but I’m not afraid of failure so I set out to create a Foursquare experiment.

The basic premise was this – we created a hashtag, #100X100, that stood for 1 in 100 on the 100th day of the year. I created a website, http://onehundredsquared.com to explain what it was, why it was important and to determine the actions we wanted supporters to take: spread awareness using the hashtag and call/write their representatives asking them to support the Congenital Heart Futures Act and Pulse-Ox screening of CHD to the National Newborn Screening Panel. We also created a Facebook fanpage and Twitter profile.

We recruited volunteers to commit to a guerrilla, grass-roots effort to use Foursquare to parlay our message. On the evening of April 9th a few dozen Big Love Little Hearts volunteers added the following as a “tip” to 600 Foursquare locations:  “1in100 children are born w/ a heart defect. Pulse-Ox screening saves lives – you can too! Check in with the hashtag #100X100.” We also embedded a link in the tip to the One Hundred Squared website. We chose what we thought would be the most checked-in locations on a Saturday: airports, Starbucks’, Target’s, gym’s, etc. in every major city.

One of the benefits of using Foursquare as an origin point is that most people who use it sync their check-ins to Twitter and Facebook. This meant that one person checking with #100X100 had the possibility of being viewed across three different platforms with three audiences. Talk about bang for your (time) buck!

Did it work? Better than I could have possibly imagined.  My goal was to see how social media worked for advocacy and awareness. However, something extraordinary happened: I began foursquaring/tweeting/facebooking about #100X100 at 12:01 am on April 10 and Big Love Little Hearts’ supporters followed.

At 7:30 am an angel who was following one of our followers on Twitter (but not us) noticed our hashtag. (She is an adult with a CHD who was not diagnosed at birth and who is alive today because she received lifesaving surgery.) Her passion for our work led her to call me and commit to donating $1 for every time someone used the #100X100 hashtag until midnight April 10th.

How much did we raise?  She gave me a cap of $25,000. I knew the moment she said it that as a not-quite ten month old organization we wouldn’t reach the cap. Much to my surprise our supporters were so engaged that we reached it by almost half.

At quarter to midnight the hashtag had been used 11,703 times across all three platforms. Our donor was so impressed that she committed all $25,000, which funded 12 surgeries in developing countries. Twelve lives saved in 24 hours.

That’s great (okay, FANTASTIC), but did it work for advocacy and awareness? YES! Less than two weeks after the 100th day of the year about 100 people from various CHD groups were to meet in Washington  for CHD Lobby Day. The One Hundred Squared website, as linked through Foursquare and the hashtag, asked people to contact their representatives. We wanted to plant a seed for anyone who used #100X100 on the 10th to call their Senator or Congressman and let them know that they supported measures that would greatly improve the lives of the 2 million people living with CHD in the states.

On the April 22 (CHD Lobby Day) we used the hashtag via Twitter, Facebook and Foursquare to remind our supporters to call their legislators. By noon more people had looked at the website than the entirety of April 10. I had seven appointments with Senators  & Congressman from Illinois that day. There wasn’t a single one I walked into where their aide didn’t inform me that constituents had been calling about this all day. People Lobby Day delegates from other states texted or called me to say the same. More than 500 people told me that they had contacted their representative, and 300 others contacted the Big Love office to do the same. 1800+ viewed the page and clicked through the link to find their representative. I cried with pride the entire day.

What was the benefit of using Foursquare as our social-media springboard? The tips we left are still there and will stay there perpetually. For several locations our tip is still the most recent. Did I mention that we have a link embedded in the tip?

A huge “thank you” to everyone who participated in #100X100 on April 10h and 22 – you made it such a success that the Big Love Little Hearts sister organization, 1 in 100, changed its name and expanded its mission. (Check back with http://onehundredsquared.com soon – or subscribe -for more details)!

One last nugget – all of this was FREE. We raised $25,000, saved 12 lives in the immediate and set the stage for millions of lives to be changed.

Estrella Rosenberg is the Founder and Director of Big Love Little Hearts, One Hundred Squared, Little Leo Foundation and The 4F Club. She writes about her love of non-profit work in her blog, Adventures In Philanthropy.

Big Love Little Hearts provides lifesaving surgery to children with congenital heart defects in developing countries. Almost one million children are born with a heart defect worldwide every year – half will need surgery to survive. Ninety percent will be born in countries where access to lifesaving measures is limited by economic status or lack of infrastructure. Follow them on Twitter. Follow One Hundred Squared on Twitter here.

I had the pleasure of presenting to the Israel Venture Network Fellows today about social media strategy, campaigns, and fundraising. I am really struck me how much of online fundraising comes down to a combination of social media basics plus community organizing principles. The slide show (below) captures why online campaigns are the social proof of these concepts.

Amy Sample Ward, Ivan Boothe, and myself created a slide show for the workshop that we’ll be giving at the Nonprofit Technology Conference. As part of the workshop Bringing Community Organizing Into Online Campaigns, we debated the essential elements of a good online campaign (fundraising or otherwise), the basic tenets of community organizing, and the nature of community organizing. We came up with five basic community organizing concepts. These concepts apply perfectly to any fundraising campaign. They are:

• movement-building
• power analysis
• community accountability (transparency)
• being where the stakeholders are
• leadership development

With any online fundraising campaign, your organization will be speaking about the project and asking others to influence their online ties to do the same. Take the basic principles of social media and continue to use them to raise funds: have shareable content and share utility, utilize the power of influence marketing and the power of weak ties, offer a great product/content, recognize people who give, and thank them profusely. Allow others to have the conversation about you publicly. (And use this opportunity to recruit new stakeholders to your social spaces.) Now mix that with community organizing and this is what you get:

• Link your fundraising project to the larger cause movement to give it emphasis and compelling context
• Power mapping: ID influencers, key donors, and how the donors will share and influence
  
• Develop online influencers and key online donors into organizational leaders
• Be where the people are: make sure that online activity within the campaign occurs where your stakeholders are
• Transparency means: broadcast as much about the campaign, on the campaign site and social media, as it happens

I think of this presentation as a starting point: what else would you consider the “fundamental principles” of social network fundraising? What have I missed? What have I mentioned that’s essential?

(Thanks to Amy Sample Ward for providing the screen shots of the Tweetsgiving campaign example in the slide show, below.)

Resources:

Epic Change (the folks who bring you Tweetsgiving)

How Social Media Can Engage New Donors – slideshare presentation by Steve Drake

Bringing Community Organizing Into Online Campaigns – presentation developed for the upcoming NTC workshop April 9, 2010

If you’re planning a social media campaign, how important is it to integrate bloggers before and during the campaign? I’m referring to social media campaigns launched on a platform(s) other than a blog platform.

People join causes because they know and trust either the organization itself, or someone associated with the cause. Translating this to our virtual lives, outside bloggers have the reach and trust to be that friend that recruits others to a cause or a campaign. I know this from my community organizing days: friends bring friends into a a cause or a campaign. The strongest advocates become the best recruiters.

Bloggers not only have reach within their community, but they amplify their reach through social bookmarking (Digg, StumpleUpon, etc), re-tweets, and of course leveraging their personal twitter networks. Also, bloggers tell compelling stories. From John Haydon: “Bloggers can have the biggest impact in online campaigns by telling a sincere, heartfelt story. They can also have a big impact by knowing who among their readers would also stand up and take action for particular causes.” During social media campaigns, bloggers are the grease that can push a campaign forward, help it gain momentum, and bring needed attention and value when it is faltering.

I believe that bloggers play an integral role in the success of the campaign, and I spent some time trying to find evidence of their contributions to online campaigns.

Opportunity International Australia: Micro Finance Trust Fund Camapaign

As an Australian ambassador for Opportunity International, Jasmin Tragas pledged to raise $10,000 to create a micro finance trust fund for female entrepreneurs in the Philippines. She created an online fundraising campaign, and blogger relations was integral to iy.  As part of the campaign, Jasmin created an eBook about female world shapers entitled “WorldShapers: Extraordinary Women Making a Difference.” Many of the women featured in the book wrote blog posts about the cause and championed the campaign. (Disclosure: I was one of the women featured in the eBook.) When I asked Jasmin to describe the role of bloggers in the campaign, she replied, “huge in terms of getting visibility. Not just bloggers writing about the campaign but also sharing in fun blog challenges. This raised the profile and brand. Blogging may not have helped right away but that it increased visibility over time. I was describing it to friends earlier today as a trickle effect.”

Visible Government: Beers for Canada

Beers for Canada was a social media campaign run by Visible Government to fund software to monitor government transparency. According to an interview with Alistair Croll on Beth’s Blog, the organizers pre-seeded the 3-day campaign by identifying and speaking with key bloggers and twitterers, who brought their voices to the campaign. Incredibly popular and respected bloggers (Tim O’Reily, Om Malik. Tara Hunt) also tweeted about the campaign.

Epic Change: Tweetsgiving 2008

Epic Change’s Tweetsgiving  2008 event was extremely successful in terms of the amount of tweets, publicity and funds raised to build a school in Tanzania. In Avi Kaplan’s Tweetgiving analysis, he writes that the campaign pre-seeded the event with a few bloggers, but not many. The blogger mentions began to roll in as the campaign gained momentum, resulting in over 100 press and blogger mentions. Deeper analysis revealed that 15% of the visits to the donation/Epic Change Tweetsgiving site came from blog posts and articles. Avi writes: “the press we received was so valuable to Epic Change and continues to benefit the organization, but in terms of raw traffic, it looks like word of mouth and twitter mentions were the main drivers.”

Epic Change: Tweetsgiving 2009

This year’s Tweetsgiving 2009 social media campaign (November 24 – 26) embraced and integrated bloggers. The Tweetsgiving website encourages participants to self-organize into groups; the “Blogger’s Group” is one of them. Organizers also pre-seeded the campaign by asking influencers within certain online communities to bring their own “flock of Turkeys” (my wording, not theirs) to the event, essentially turning these influencers into recruiters and campaign leaders. (Disclosure: I am a member of this group, called Wild Turkeys – their wording, not mine.) John Haydon (one of the campaign leaders) told me that “for Tweetsgiving, the main role bloggers have is encouraging their communities to participate.”

How important are bloggers to online campaigns? Very.

A trusted blogger is the Walter Cronkite of his/her community.

Walter Cronkite was “the most trusted man in America” for decades. If he would have told my parents to donate money to your cause, I’m sure they would have opened up their checkbook and written one right then. Use trusted bloggers to be your campaign’s Walter Cronkite.

Have any of you been involved in campaigns that use bloggers? How was the blogger element integral to the campaign’s success? Did you learn any great lessons or best practices you’d like to share here? I hope that this is the beginning of a list of campaigns that have used bloggers, and anecdotes about the effect of blogging on the outcomes. I’ll keep the list as a reference guide for others planning their next social media campaigns.  Look forward to the hearing about the campaigns!

This is an in-depth analysis about how one organization used Facebook Events to tie online and offline organizing, and how it transformed the organization in the process. Sviva Israel utilizes community organizing techniques and social media to stimulate real world action and create environmental awareness. I don’t know of any other group that has mastered the art of the Facebook Event to this extent.  It is my pleasure to feature for this Blog Action Day Sviva Israel’s Eco Lights campaign.

Sviva Israel began as the dream of Carmi Wisemon, a veteran environmental activist, and his wife Tamar, a journalist and marketing director. They wanted to connect Jewish environmental education with youth, educators, and their families to lower environmental impact.

Soon after establishing their nonprofit, they created  the Facebook Group Israel, Judaism, and the Environment. Sviva Israel’s first big social media activity was a Facebook Event in December 2007 that quickly became known as “Eco Lights.”

Eco Lights is an online Facebook Event that combines the real-world activity of picking up trash with online lessons relating Judaism to the environment. During the campaign, participants pledge to pick up daily the number of pieces of trash that corresponds to the numbered day of Hannukah. For example, on the fourth day of Hannukah, Eco Lights participants would pick up four pieces of trash. Additionally during Hannukah, Eco Lights participants receive a daily newsletter with writings by worldwide Jewish leaders connecting Judaism and environmental awareness, which are also updated daily on the Event page.

Carmi summarizes the philosophy of Eco Lights

Participants most likely will pick up trash, but that is really something personal. Beyond the number of pieces of trash we are trying to change a mindset beyond Hannukah and beyond the eight days of the event. The eight days of sharing teachings and picking up after others is in order to get people to do those actions informally throughout the year individually and as groups.

During the first Eco Lights Event 116 event participants confirmed “yes,” and 50 said “maybe”. After the event, they asked everyone to join the Facebook Group, and sign up for their newsletter.

By 2008, Eco Lights had grown tremendously. Two organizations, Telavit and Eco-Jews of the Bay, joined the campaign and tripled the number of participants.  The Worldwide Council of Conservative Synagogues included all of the Eco Lights daily lessons on a Judaism and Environment CD, which they posted on their website. They also sent the CDs to Conservative Jewish congregations worldwide. During the campaign, approximately 2,500 people participated and/or received daily lessons. Many shared the campaign on Facebook and with friends.

In 2008, participation grew 855% (at a minimum). The event also created worldwide awareness of Sviva Israel, and the beginning of the organization’s real growth.

Key lessons that Sviva Israel has learned from the Eco Lights campaigns:

• You need a policy about Facebook Event “maybes” – these don’t exist in other social media spaces.
• It’s impossible to track an event message, which can be frustrating for the analytical.
• Don’t just run an event exclusively on Facebook, because it’s annoying to those people who do not belong to Facebook and still want to receive information.
  
• If you are running an event using social media, take it the whole way with a multi-channel approach.
• Social media is about community, so tap into the people who sign up – they may want to take a more active role in the event.
• It proved harder to get people to opt-in from the event to the Sviva Israel Facebook Group. Around 50% moved over.  It was much, much harder to get people to sign up for the regular newsletter. Creating a dedicated Eco Lights website will make a big difference in this issue.

How has this Facebook Event transformed Sviva Israel itself?

• They just hired a U.S staffer with an office in Boston to bring their on line and on site activities to the U.S. This is a development that started as a result of the Eco Lights campaign.
• They just won a Microsoft R&D (Israel) grant to develop a new online project. According to Tamar Wisemon,  “I think part of what convinced them was our proven success and expertise in social media on a small scale. It showed them that we have the creativity and drive to apply our visions on a larger scale.”
• Some of the organizations that partnered with Eco Lights have collaborated on other, larger projects of Sviva Israel.
• Potential funders know that Sviva Israel can do a lot with limited resources by thinking out-of-the-box, which is a key skill in today’s economy.
• Many of those involved have become key figures in Sviva Israel’s  growth both through volunteering and donations.

In 2009, Sviva predicts a growth of 150% for Eco Lights. They plan to develop a robust web page for the campaign, use twitter vigorously, tie in Flickr, and tap into sponsorships and more partners. They also want to create additional live, localized on-site events tied into the global online campaign.

That’s a lot of trash disposal, learning and change. Online environmental organizing translates to real change.

Sviva Israel does it right.

Today Sviva Israel is a worldwide environmental educational organization with great projects and initiatives. You can read more about their great work here.