Mashable’s Summer of Social Good
Posted by Allison Fine on June 10, 2009
Mashable has announced a giving campaign that runs from June 1st through August 28th of this year to raise money for four terrific causes; The Humane Society, Oxfam, World Wildlife Fund and LiveStrong.
It will be very intersting to see how this effort unfolds. Mashable is a very widely read site with amazing reach on a host of other channels like Twitter and Facebook. As Jocelyn wrote, “I’m excited to see how this campaign unfolds as it will provide additional benchmarks and information regarding the ROI of social media and how nonprofits can best use these channels.”
So, of course, I wish them well and hope the Summer of Social Good turns out better than the Summer of George. But I was stopped short when I read the first sentence on the Mashable’s site about the campaign, “Summer of Social Good is the first large scale online charitable campaign to raise funds strictly online through the power of Social Media and the Internet.” This is simply not true, in particular they would have been well served to take a peek at how America’s Giving Challenge sponsored by The Case Foundation unfolded. As a result of that fifty day effort over 80,000 people gave $1.7 million.
But more than the total numbers of people who gave and total dollar amount that they gave, The Challenge (FYI: Beth and I authored an assessment report of the Challenge that will be released by the Foundation this month)
What that Challenge had that the Summer of Social Good is a sense of urgency for donors, without which it is too easy for people who intend to give, want to give, mean to give, to just put it off. The urgency of the Challenge resulted from the financial match that The Case Foundation offered daily and at the end of the effort to reward the causes that raised the largest number of friends not dollars. A sense of urgency to motivate people to give also came from the length of the campaign (which was too long at 50 days) and a leader board that provided real-time data for participants to know how there were doing.
Again, I hope that the Summer of Social Good is phenomenally successful, just wish they had built their effort on the lessons learned from previous campaigns.
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This entry was posted on June 10, 2009 at 4:28 am and is filed under Social Media. Tagged: america's giving challenge, Mashable, Summer of Social Good, The Case Foundation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
5 Responses to “Mashable’s Summer of Social Good”
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Kari Saratovsky said
Allison, thanks for continuing to bring light to the conversation around online giving challenges. Mashable is the latest in a series of recent online competitions that will benefit nonprofit organizations – and we commend them for taking this step to involve their community in raising money for important causes.
When the Case Foundation launched our first giving challenge back in ’07-08, we’d hoped that others would follow suit — and in their own way replicate our efforts. We’ve watched as others have done so, and we have already had some great conversations with the leadership of Mashable to ensure that we can work together and lift up each others efforts in the future.
We look forward to releasing our findings from America’s Giving Challenge later this month so that others can benefit from what we learned in our first “experiment.”
Beth Kanter said
Yes, looks like the learning is very much needed to be shared!
links for 2009-06-11 « CauseWired Communications said
[...] Mashable’s Summer of Social Good « A. Fine Blog Mashable has announced a giving campaign that runs from June 1st through August 28th of this year to raise money for four terrific causes; The Humane Society, Oxfam, World Wildlife Fund and LiveStrong. [...]
carol cone said
Good to correct their claim.
Cant wait to see your report.
Your commentary always adds value.
Thanks
GradonTripp.com » Blog Archive » A Fine Misread? said
[...] and author of “Momentum: Igniting social change in the connected age”, recently wrote a post criticizing Mashable’s Summer of Social Good (full disclosure: SM4SC is a partner in the SoSG) for its claim to be “the first large scale [...]