09 Aug 2010 No Comments
How to be a Twitter fundraising powerhouse like Keith Powell
Keith Powell ponders the intricacies of online fundraising
Two weeks ago, actor Keith Powell (30 Rock) responded to Alyssa Milano’s challenge to be a “real man” and donate money to the World Wildlife Federation to help the cleanup effort for the Gulf oil spill. Rather than simply writing a check and walking away, Powell decided instead to create a FirstGiving fundraising page (which can be found at www.firstgiving.com/realkeithpowell) and asking his wide network of Twitter followers to support him by making donations (you can follow him on Twitter too: @realkeithpowell). In two weeks, his page has had already had over 70 donors and has raised over $3000!
You might now be thinking “How can I have this kind of rapid success? I’m not a Hollywood actor!” That may be true. But it doesn’t mean you can’t use the same techniques he used to get the maximum response from your social network.
First of all, he made his page interesting. He’s personalized it with his photo and written text that makes it clear why he’s raising money and asking people to give what they can, as often as they can. He’s also added a brief but effective YouTube video to his page going into more detail about the fundraising challenge. Not only that, but he’s also given his donors an incentive: each day, he promises to pick a donor and make a personalized video for them.
But the best fundraising page in the world is useless if you don’t tell anyone about it. So he took it to Twitter, and tweeted the link so that all his followers could visit the page. Even if you only have a few Twitter followers, rather than thousands, it’s still a very immediate way to grab their attention. Plus, your followers can then retweet your link to their followers, and so on and so forth.
So if you’d like to get this degree of swift success, ask yourself a few questions:
- Have you done everything you could to make your page personal and compelling (adding a picture, writing a message, even adding a YouTube video)?
- What social networks do you use? Facebook? Twitter? Other sites? Post the link there and encourage your friends on those sites to visit your fundraising page.
- What incentives can you offer your donors to ensure they’ll donate, or even better, return and donate again? Can you do something for them, make something for them, or give them some kind of special recognition? Of course, giving is its own reward, but having a little something extra can really motivate donors to dig deeper into their pockets.
Good luck, and happy fundraising!
