The Organization Making Charitable Giving Easier Than Ever

The hashtag dominates cyberspace and our lives, regardless of whether or not we understand where it comes from. (You can thank Twitter for its ubiquitousness.) And now, one group is harnessing the power of the hashtag to bring social good.
Instead of visiting a charity’s website and inputting a whole bunch of information, GoodWorld developed #donate, which allows social media users to donate directly to a charity when they use it.
It’s literally as simple as it sounds. According to the Washington Post, once a charity registers with GoodWorld, all a Facebook or Twitter user needs to do is include the hashtag in their message, along with the amount being given, and a donation is made directly to the nonprofit. (Facebook users must also post it on the charity’s page.) For a first donation, users must supply their basic information, but with all subsequent gifts, only the hashtag is required.
GoodWorld just launched on Oct. 7 and already has seven charities on board: ALS Association, Women Thrive Worldwide, Becky’s Fund, Global Kids, Alliance for Peacebuilding, Healthy Living, Inc. and Lolly’s Locks. Soon, though, GoodWorld plans to have about 30 additional participants.
Seven percent of each donation is kept by GoodWorld with the remainder going directly to the charity.
GoodWorld founder Dale Phiefer hopes that using by social media, the importance of giving will be amplified and go viral.
“What’s really important with giving is that the head, the heart and the action can happen at one time,” Pfeifer tells the Washington Post. “With online giving people were seeing things and feeling the emotion but had to take like eight steps to go and do it.”
Bill Thoet is the chairman ALS Association board and believes that GoodWorld would have definitely benefited the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge.
“We have pretty good donation Web sites, but you have to fill out a lot of information. You have to go through that,” Thoet says. “There were a lot more videos out there than there were donations. And I can’t think that there were a lot of procrastinators out there that meant to do it, that wanted to do it, but didn’t go through those steps.”
MORE: Two Leaders in Labor Rethink Social Safety Nets in a Freelance Economy

What You Need to Know About the 5 Most Successful Social Media Campaigns for Social Change

The videos filled your Facebook and Twitter feeds for weeks. Everyone from your great aunt to your favorite actor to politicians jumped on the bandwagon and doused themselves with ice-cold water all in the name of charity.
Whether you love it, hate it or experienced the challenge’s chill firsthand, it’s official: The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, in all its cold, wet glory, is a bona fide social media success. But it’s far from the first online marketing campaign to go viral. Here are five social media campaigns — and what you need to know about them — that have made a substantial impact on an organization’s efforts to raise awareness or funds for its cause.
[ph][ph][ph][ph][ph]
Did we miss one that stood out to you? Let us know in the comments!
 

A Little Birdie Told Us That a Tech Giant is Building a Nest to Help the Poor

As we’ve said, income inequality in America is perhaps nowhere more evident than in San Francisco, where a renewed tech boom has dropped the unemployment rate to 4.8 percent, compared to the 6.3 percent national rate. Meanwhile, median rents have skyrocketed to a 40 percent share of the median income, leaving the one in five Bay Area residents who live in poverty sometimes literally out in the cold.
The stark differences between the lives of the tech-employed-haves and the have-nots have led some frustrated people to stage protests near the shuttle buses that ferry workers to Google and other tech companies. In contrast, however, is the action from one of the giants in social media.
Twitter has announced it’s going to reach out to the homeless and low-income families in the Tenderloin, the long-impoverished neighborhood near its headquarters. The company plans to collaborate with Compass Family Services (CFS), a nonprofit serving 3,500 homeless families, to create and run a family learning center called the Twitter Neighborhood Nest, which is projected to open in the summer of 2015. Company executives have pledged to chip in more than $1 million to the project.
The center will provide low-income people with access to computers, Wi-Fi, and other resources; volunteers from Twitter will teach technology classes to homeless families. Erica Kisch, executive director of CFS told Joe Garofoli of the San Francisco Chronicle, “This will be a major breakthrough for our families. To make it in the world today, just to make it through school, you need these skills.”
Twitter’s new nest certainly has the potential of helping low-income residents of San Francisco cross the digital divide. But we have a hunch that to be successful, they might need to use more than 140 characters.
MORE: San Francisco’s Tech Talent Lends A Hand to Help the Homeless
 

This Technologist Retweeted Only Women for a Year and It Broadened His Horizons

Tech entrepreneur Anil Dash has made a name for himself through such projects as Expert Labs, a non-profit that aimed to help “ordinary citizens who aren’t lobbyists or insiders or politicians get their voices heard by policy makers simply by using social networks like Twitter and Facebook,” according to its website. Through blogging about technology and being an early Twitter user, Dash has gained almost 500,000 Twitter followers, which got him to thinking about how he could use his influence to help others be heard.
Dash is currently the CEO of ThinkUp, “which is all about being more thoughtful about the way we use our social networks,” he writes in an essay on Medium. An analytics tool showed him that 75% of his Twitter followers are men, and that 80% of the tweets he retweeted were written by men. He feels “a growing sense of social responsibility about what messages I choose to share and amplify, and whose voices and identities I strive to bring to a broader audience.”
Considering how underrepresented women are in the field of technology, Dash resolved to only retweet tweets by women in 2013, and it opened his eyes. “One thing that has happened,” he writes, “is that I’ve been in far more conversations with women, and especially with women of color, on Twitter in the past year. That’s led to me following more women, and has caused a radical shift in how I perceive my time on Twitter, even though its actual substance isn’t that different.” In general, Dash found women on Twitter to be more thankful and less focused on certain pervasive memes or tech stories than men. Dash said he only slipped up once, retweeting a message by Prince. Now he’s inviting others to try only retweeting women, especially those in fields dominated by men.
MORE: Why Are These Female Scientists Tweeting Photos of Their Manicures?

Why Are These Female Scientists Tweeting Photos of Their Manicures?

Hope Jahren runs the geobiology lab at the University of Hawaii Manoa that bears her name, The Jahren Lab, where scientists study things like the carbon isotope composition of terrestrial land plants. But just because Jahren is brainy, it doesn’t mean she can’t also enjoy showing off her manicure. Jahren noticed that Seventeen magazine regularly invites its readers to share a photo of their nails on Twitter with the hashtag #ManicureMonday. Jahren thought, why not invite female scientists to contribute to this Twitter hashtag in the hopes of changing girls’ perceptions of what it means to be a scientist?
She tweeted her idea and it took off, attracting such manicure photos as that of Sarah Hörst, working on a post-doctorate in Astrophysics at the University of Colorado, who posed her glossy planet-themed nail next to a tiny model of the Mars Rover. Jahren recently tweeted a photo of herself holding a dish of algal infections, which she described as “the bane of our existence here in @JahrenLab.” Other scientists posted photos of their nails gripping beakers or ferns or measuring fossils or accessorizing with leaf insect nymphs.
Young women checking out the Seventeen hashtag responded by tweeting questions to the scientists, and just may have had their minds changed about what a typical scientist looks like. Jahren told Laura Vanderkam of USA Today, “I like to have pretty nails and cute shoes and makeup and dresses, and I do care about the way I look. But I am also very serious about my science, and these two things are not incompatible.” The scientist manicure photos, which continue to appear, sound like a fun Twitter game that just might get girls to consider the important academic field.
MORE: This Woman is Inspiring the Next Generation of Female Engineers
 

How Tweeting Can Help With Teaching

If you can’t beat Generation Smartphone, join them. Many media-savvy teachers have found that using Twitter can actually help enrich their lectures. Take Chris Lazarski’s public policy class at Wauwatosa West High School in Milwaukee. As the AP reports, the teacher uses Twitter to promote dialogue about current events. For example, after a lecture on zero-tolerance policies in high school, he had his students tweet their reactions. Some students tweeted at industry experts, others retweeted articles that shared their opinions.
You might buck at the idea of giving students more time with their phones, but if used correctly, social media can have a whole host of benefits. Students learn the responsibilities of having an online presence at an early age. The #hashtag feature means that anyone in the world with a Twitter handle can join in on the discussion. Twitter can also help shy students who don’t like raising their hands in class find their voice, 140 characters at a time.
Lazarski takes part in the “Do Now” program from San Francisco-based TV station KQED that features weekly Twitter-friendly topics such as elections, politics, and international news. The growing program is now used by more than 120 teachers in California, Oregon, Kentucky, Texas, Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan, West Virginia and New York.
MORE: Infographic: How Social Media Is Used For Social Good

Finish This Sentence — and Change Your Town Forever

If you could change one thing about your neighborhood, what would it be? A farmer’s market in that abandoned lot on the corner? Speed bumps? A park bench?
Such wishes are becoming less and less idle, thanks to a growing New Orleans startup called Neighborland. The company built a web platform that functions as a community bulletin board, one that begins with a simple Mad Lib: I want _____ In ______. I want a bike lane, for example, on 6th Street in San Francisco.
Then, the magic happens. One by one, other community members, either people who actually live in that neighborhood or those who use and care about it, signify that they want that thing too, by clicking “me too.” It could stop there, with the same kind of “clicktivism” for which millennials are so often mocked. But then Neighborland steps in and catalyzes the idea, either with funding help, institutional know-how or by creating partnerships with the appropriate local organizations that can corral those latent desires and get things done. Continue reading “Finish This Sentence — and Change Your Town Forever”