subject: How To Use Twitter Effectively To Raise Funds For Non-profit Projects [print this page] If you have a legitimate non-profit cause for which you wish to know how to raise funds without spending money on advertising, Twitter can provide a relatively easy fundraising project for you.
Here's why this is so:
- You have a worthwhile cause - let's say you want to help a children's cancer research fund raise money.
- The format of Twitter makes it easy for you to tweet about this fundraising drive and include a link to an article about what the funds can help accomplish.
- If you have a decent amount of followers, there are bound to be several followers who will retweet this information because these followers also believe in your cause.
- As you are not self-promoting but rather promoting for a good cause, you can repeat your tweet more times without annoying your followers.
Now let's look at more specifics on how to raise funds on Twitter:
In the summer of 2008 I was one of three lead Twitter promoters of a non-profit cause. Between myself and the other two women we were able to tweet about the cause, write blog posts (we each have our own blog), and encourage others to tweet about the cause and write blog posts.
Then I had an idea. Why not encourage others to donate more by awarding prizes to the top five donors? (There was a specific cut-off date for this campaign.) And why not give other people the opportunity for free publicity by donating prizes for the campaign?
And that's what we did. We tweeted asking for donations for the campaign and we tweeted the names of the donors who contributed the prizes and what those prizes were.
Thanks to all this Twitter activity, this campaign picked up steam. And it was helped by the specific cut-off date so that we could create a sense of urgency as the deadline approached: How much would we raise? Who would be the top five donors who would get all the prizes?
More tips for easy fundraising:
- Conduct the campaign over a specific time period and include the end date in your tweets.
- Try to get partners to help you promote the campaign.
- Encourage other people to write blog posts about the Twitter campaign.
- If you don't have your own blog, use twitwall.com to write an explanation about the campaign that will automatically link from your tweet.
- In your tweets be sure to thank people who are helping spread the word or are donating prizes or giving funds.
- Do tweet about other things during the campaign period so that you don't appear to only be a one-topic Twitter person.
This blueprint for how to raise funds on Twitter can be adapted for all kinds of non-profit projects.
One word of caution: I would recommend that you do NOT run continuous fundraising campaigns on Twitter. You do not want to annoy your followers by asking for funds too often. As with many things in life, less is often more.
by: Phyllis Zimbler Miller
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