GiveForward

We knew Twestival, the world’s largest Twitter fundraising drive, was going to be huge with great partners such as Mashable lending their support.  There has never been another event like the Twestival held February 12, 2009 benefiting charity: water and this goes down in the record books as a smashing success.  With just over a month to organize the event, Amanda Rose, global organizer of Twestival, gathered support of volunteers in 202 cities around the world. 

Under the direction of Amanda Rose, the nearly 1000 volunteers hosted events in over 200 cities with over 10,000 people in attendance. While the totals are still rolling in, the most recent estimate of total raised is over a quarter of a million dollars ($250K) for charity:water.  While this falls shy of the original million-dollar goal, these impressive numbers are a true representation of what grass roots fundraising looks like when supporters join together for a cause they believe in.  

Charity:water is an organization dedicated to bringing awareness to the fact that one in six of us doesn’t have clean water to drink.  Through partnering with local communities, charity:water is involved in drilling wells, rehabilitating existing wells, rainwater catchment projects, water towers and pond sand filters.  To date they have helped 650,000 people have a source of clean drinking water.  With the donation of $250,000 they will be able to fund 55 water projects in 3 countries, providing over 17,000 people with clean drinking water.

Impressive numbers indeed. 

Many cities got creative with the fundraising.  Austin, TX, known so much for being a funky city that they have a campaign of bumper stickers that read “Keep Austin Weird!” held a sumo suit wrestling contest.  San Francisco, another city of creatives, featured poi fire dancing.  To create buzz in London, a 3500 piece Lego Death Star was raffled.   Clearly some great talent was behind organizing this event. 

While it can feel like a disappointment to have not reached the original goal of one million dollars, it increases determination.  The drive to reach $1 million continues through a variety of ways including: 

• Music at Twestival.fm 
• Buying an official Twestival T-shirt 
• Take part in the Ebay auction 
• Donations to charity:water 

With 100% of all proceeds going to charity:water. 

Who would have ever thought Twitter would be so powerful? 

The world is changing fast and that holds true for fundraising as well. Gone are the days of waiting to be mailed the invitation to a once a year charity ball with silent auction. Now we see fundraising in connection with powerful social networking tools such as Facebook, blogs and Twitter. This past week Twitter users made their power known with record turnout around the globe for the Twestival.

For those that don’t know, Twitter is a powerful communication tool with the ability to unite, inform and mobilize users instantly. It’s a microblogging application with over two million active users. Create a user name and you are set to tell your life story in 140 character increments known as “tweets.” Users can “tweet” to each other using the @ symbol directly before a username and thus multiple conversations are started. These tweets cover a wide variety of topics including web use, making weekend plans and questions about kids. It’s an up to the minute stream about everyday life.

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