Twitter and Fundraising - 1 day 'til Dallas Twestival

Listening in on the final conference call to organize tomorrow nights local version of twestival, I find myself hearing the same kind of last minute details that would be talked about whether the event took a year to plan. Of course, all over the world, it has been put together by volunteers in about two weeks time.

I am typing this with tweetdeck open on my desktop and a search feed set to the term "twestival." The tweet signal is going off every 30 seconds or so with an average of 5 updates containing the word each time. It is amazing. The planning progress that I have been reporting on for Dallas in the last week has been replicated in hundreds of cities, each with their own grass roots volunteerism.

4 cities in Africa
26 cities in Asia Pacific
54 cities in Europe
7 cities in the Middle East
75 cities in North America
20 cities in South America
2 virtual twestivals (in Moderne Island and Second Life)

Each has a organically designated volunteer coordinator(s) and an active plan to get together in the name of Charity: Water.

Press coverage has been expectantly minimal. If you listen to the most recent Dallas twestival conference call you will hear of some press coverage that has been negative from news outlets that "just don't get it." The NY times did post a brief write up today that obviously had a day or so of research behind it.

I'd like to lift this quote from the NY Times piece and make an observation for nonprofits.

Ms. Rose said that the Twitter community is particularly adept at mobilizing Internet activity into real-world action because the undercurrent of social currency is strong within the service’s ever-expanding community.

If your NPO ever wants to come close to having social media have an impact on your development or fund raising efforts, you must trust the adeptness of the community's social currency.

Speaking of currency, you can monitor the growing fund raising mark through the tipjoy home page. The day of twestivities has already started in some parts of the world.

Twitter and Fundraising - 2 days 'til Dallas Twestival

Here is the ongoing report of the worldwide Twestival 2009 coming together in Dallas.

If you listened to the conference call that I linked you to yesterday, you heard the reference to other metro areas organizing their own events. Los Angeles is one local event that is coming together with the help of some high profile web celebrities. ijustine put together this video to promote the worlwide and the local LA event.


If you look around at some of these other local tweet ups that are coming together, you'll realize that many of them have set local goals. I have read in several places that the worldwide goal is $500,000. Los Angeles alone has a goal of $250,000. London launched a little music station for all the bands that will be performing called twestival.fm which has it's own $20,000 goal. It will be an interesting number to track and count and see grow. Because it's fundrasing organized from the bottom up, I don't know that there is a central thermometer that we can watch the funds associated with twestival be accurately counted.

Here is the main lesson your organization can learn from Charity: Water and they way they are interacting as recipients of the twitter communities generosity and efforts.

They have let go of their need to control it.
They are not running around enforcing branding standards or editorial platforms.
Charity: Water, I suspect, is just barely riding the wave that will flood over them come Thursday...and they are letting it happen.
Most nonprofits probably aren't engaged in this grass roots conversation enough for it to happen to them. And most would accidentally kill it by trying to control it (if it ever started to happen to them)

If the development cycle for you is...

Acquisition, Cultivation, Solicitation, and Stewardship.

You must have a good Acquisition and Cultivation strategy in order to get close to a good Solicitation strategy. If you are going to engage in social media conversations as part of your Cultivation tactics, you will kill the conversation by turning it into a Solicitation tactic. You will kill it fast.

Charity: Water controls it's Solicitation tactics and strategy. Here is an example of Cultivation naturally bubbling up into it's own kind of Solicitation. Charity: Water is an example to us all by just letting it happen.

Twitter and Fundraising - 3 days 'til Dallas Twestival

Late last week I sat in on a public conference call for Dallas Twestival, the local version of ground swell volunteerism for Twestival 2009.

Lauren Vargas, local volunteer coordinator for the Dallas event led the call. I asked her in a tweet earlier in the day if it would be barging in for me to be a fly on the wall for the call. She tweeted me right back and assured that it wouldn't be barging at all.

I just love the transparency that shows up when sprinting to organize something within a couple of weeks. As I sat and listened to the stage of planning this group of volunteers was at, it was exciting to hear the excitement and nerves of an event that had a lot of work to do, but was obviously coming together nicely. Different people had stepped up to take on various aspects of the planning. You could hear that there was a level of expertise in various professions that was being tapped into to cover the details of the event. I missed the Sunday evening planning call, but if you'd like to hear the evolution of the event coming together, the Monday evening planning call was recorded and is available here under "clip one".

The group has been doing a good job of using twitter and a wiki site to communicate calls, announcements, and ongoing needs. There is still time for you to step up and figure out how you can fit in to the volunteer coordination.

A couple of observations at this point in the process...

1. These people are great and they mostly seemed to find each other through twitter, with no prior affinity to the charity.

2. Grass roots planning is exciting. It is great to watch a group sprint to finish without any time to get territorial or political.

3. Transparency is so refreshing. It is a great reflection of social media at it's best.

When this make news the morning after, just be aware that this "grass roots effort" had some active blades of grass who do a lot of work for the rest of the lawn. The world wide community was ripe to do something, ANYTHING productive with the community energy. Tapping into that community would demand that you participate in
the conversation. Until your organization is authentically willing to participate in the emerging conversation, social media will continue to be a foreign language for you to interpret in vain.