21 Mar 2011 2 Comments

For Japan with Love: The power of Love and Silence.


As the world learned of the devastating national disaster that took Japan by surprise; the wedding blog Ever Ours and e-magazine Utterly Engaged created the one-day event and ongoing fundraising campaign For Japan with Love,  initiating a day of silence amongst bloggers. Bloggers quickly signed on to the Blogger’s Day of Silence, with the concept of banding together and to spend March 18th thinking of the people affected by the Japan disaster.  The call to action was simple: to communicate the day of silence, to not write a blog post on March 18th, and to direct blog readers to donate enough to meet the initial goal of sending five Shelter Boxes to Japan.

Their initiative brought together over 1200 bloggers around the world.  Each blogger honored the simple request, effectively sharing the message with their own followers by placing a badge on his or her blog, and blogging ahead of March 18th about the Day of Silence.  Twitter and Facebook awareness spread quickly. The event generated more donations than the organizers ever hoped to raise.

Ever Ours and Utterly Engaged created a donation page at FirstGiving, hoping to raise a total of $5,500 needed to send five Shelter Boxes to Japan.

Shelter Box provides a compact disaster relief kit that includes shelter and the necessities for survival after a major disaster.  Shelter Box was requested by the Japanese government to provide assistance to its people.  As of Thursday March 17th, over 400 shelter boxes had arrived in Japan and another 444 were en route.  Other supporters of Shelter Boxes for Japan through FirstGiving have raised an additional 54 boxes for a total of over $54,000.

As of today, the fundraising page has raised $54,237, which is enough to send 54 shelter boxes to Japan

We asked the Utterly Engaged and Ever Ours if they would answer few questions about their fundraiser. Their insightful answers about creating a community of fundraisers are featured below:

How did you recruit bloggers to the day of silence? What was the key to getting so many to join?

Both Utterly Engaged and Ever Ours posted it on our own blogs and since we had a following already, a few took note.  So by the end of the first day, we already had 40 or so bloggers involved.  However, we truly owe it to the power of social media, more specifically Twitter. By the second day, it had crawled up to about 100 and over the week as more people were blogging about it, it grew to about 1200 bloggers involved.

We are a part of the wedding blogging community and friends with a lot of the other bloggers. We asked for their help and it just spread. Twitter has been huge!! Twitter allowed it to spread faster and quicker.

What motivated most of your community of bloggers, in particular, to join this campaign?

What motivated the bloggers was just the fact that we were helping people.  We truly stressed that “every little helps.”  We meant it as a day of respect and remembrance for those who could no longer speak and for those who are in pain.  Seeing bloggers from all over the world participating was truly an amazing feeling.  It was not just wedding and gift bloggers, but food/fashion/mom/photography/lifestyle bloggers and more.

Do either or you have a direct relationship with Japan in any way?

Neither of us have a direct relationship with Japan aside from having friends here who have family and friends over there.  On my side, as far as I know, those friends say that their family members and friends are okay.  Some of the bloggers that had participated have family members there and had reached out to us via email with what was going on.  That was incredibly touching and heartbreaking to read.

I guess you can say it’s in our blood to want to do something when someone is going through a crisis. We couldn’t just sit there and watch the news anymore I had to do something about it.

Why did you choose to use FirstGiving?

We chose FirstGiving because the site is reliable and so easy for anyone to use.  Another factor was that ShelterBox, the organization we picked to donate to, was already associated with FirstGiving.

What do you think your fundraiser has been able to accomplish because you’ve worked in community that you would not have been able to accomplish otherwise?

We believe awareness.  Awareness with what was needed for and in Japan.  Awareness that if we all come together we can make a small impact.  Awareness that there are huge hearts in this blogging community.  Awareness that we can be heard.

The disaster in Japan broke down so many walls. We all understood the pain that Japan was going through. We were able to create a place where we could all come together in solidarity and a safe place to share the pain we have for them. We were able to reach far and wide, from fashion bloggers to design, from Southern California to  France, Germany, Slovenia, New Zealand, Australia, and eventually Japan! To get our message from Southern California to Japan was moving. We just received a letter from someone in Japan and was moved to tears. It was no longer about us, it’s about them. Letting them know that we hear them, we are here for them and help is on the way.

What has been the biggest lesson learned?

The biggest lesson learned was seriously don’t underestimate “every little helps.”  We initially thought over the span of two and a half weeks we would barely be able to raise $5,500 and have about 50 bloggers involved.  But just tweeting and facebooking about it and again, just creating awareness of what we were doing kept pushing those numbers up.  Huge hearts and their wanting to help made this happen and we can’t thank everyone involved enough.  Seeing our blogrolls fill up with our “For Japan With Love” logo made our hearts so full. Even just looking at the official site with all the names stops us in our tracks.  It’s been amazing to see the amount grow and we still have 11 more days to go!

Another lesson is to not be afraid to make a difference. If you plant that seed with the intention to help, it will instantly grow into this massive tree that will move mountains and oceans.

Lee Johnson contributed to this post. Thank you to Henny Vallee and Lucia Dinh of Utterly Engaged and Lydia Yeung of Ever Ours for contributing their thoughts and answers to our questions.

 

 

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