Tweetsgiving and Online Fundraising

If you haven't heard about it yet, be sure to check out Tweetsgiving, a project of the nonprofit Epic Change. Tweetsgiving is using micro-blogging tool Twitter to raise money for a classroom in Tanzania. Along the way, they're also compiling a log of what Twitter users are thankful for this year.

Twitter mini-fundraisers like this have become increasingly common in the past several months. In September, HeartKids used the tool to raise over $7000 for heart surgery for children in India in 24 hours. Since then, a number of organizations have had similar successes with short-term Twitter fundraisers. Inspired by Tweetsgiving, I thought I'd run a fundraiser of my own today.

Beth Kanter has a great post this week about the possibilities of fundraising in Twitter. Yesterday, The Journal of Philanthropy hosted a chat with John Haydon and Chris Garrett about Twitter and other social media tools. There's a lot of good information in the massive chat transcript.

One application that both Beth and John mention is Twitpay, a simple hack that lets you use Twitter to instantly send a PayPal payment to any person or organization with a Twitter account. It's a clever idea and, although it seems more suitable for buying someone a virtual beer than for making your end-of-the-year donations, I could see it paving the way for more innovation in microblogging as fundraising.

On the long-term implications of a Twitter fundraising strategy, I'd offer the same piece of advice I had about SMS giving strategies. I think that a Twitter fundraiser should be not only an end in itself, but also a way to start a relationship with new donors. If you don't put some effort into continuing the conversation with Twitter donors, then you may be missing out on the opportunity to develop long-term financial partners in your organization's mission.

There's a discussion about Twitter taking place in the TechSoup Community. Stop by and share your thoughts. For more information on how you could be putting Twitter to work at your organization, watch our recent TechSoup Talks! webinar on Flickr and Twitter.