This is a guest post by our friend Howard Freeman. Howard Freeman is Founder and Principal of Zoey Creative Development, a charitable giving consultancy in NYC serving both organizations and also individual philanthropists. He can be reached at howard@zoeycreativedevelopment.com.
The Upper West Side of Manhattan is not the best neighborhood to shop for cheap groceries if you only have $7.50 to cover five days. But then again, why would you try?
In May 2011, I joined thousands of others in the “Live Below the Line” Campaign organized by the Global Poverty Project (GPP). The “line” is $1.50, below which 1.4 billion people live. Sometimes an entire family lives on this amount for all needs; I was to do this alone and use only for food—my wife and kids would continue as normal. But for those doing LBL, we were being reminded for five days of the desperate need of those living in extreme poverty. So were our supporters. And the idea was to transform each of us to do something more. Beyond this one week.
Let me outline how GPP was able to accomplish this goal in me, as a micro-fundraiser for them.
Sometime in 2010, I had attended a large reception and presentation where about 200 people heard GPP Founder Hugh Evans tell his story and call us to take a simple action. Would we “Like” their Facebook page? Or write a letter to a politician? Or make a donation? And would we do it that night? I recall taking the path of least resistance: I went home and “liked” the GPP Facebook page, delegating it to the electronic attic of Fan pages alongside the TV show “House,” my favorite dead authors, and “Brother Jimmys” restaurant. In other words, I clicked “Like” on Facebook, got a laboratory-like boost of Altruistic Endorphins shooting through my body, and then I went away.
But GPP used that “Like” skillfully.
Many “Likes” on cultural items both great and small later, I got a Facebook event invitation with a link to a video, seen here. I was impressed by the quality of the video, and it didn’t hurt to have one of the X-Men pitching me. (In fact, I bet you clicked over just now, if you didn’t already.) I received another and probably a third, asking me to consider the LBL event. At one point, I just thought, “What the hey. Sure.” So I signed up to do it.
In the week before the LBL fast, I was supposed to raise money. (The food I bought is for another post.) Now, I had raised money as a professional for 16 years prior, but always on behalf of an organization, never to sponsor me personally. So, it was a bit intimidating. Yet, once I jumped, I didn’t look back.
To kick off my fundraising effort:
At the end of two days of fundraising, our team was #1 out of more than 3,000 U.S. teams, and we completed the campaign in that position. I had some eighty donors who gave gifts ranging between $10 and $250. The site listed the top ten fundraisers, and I was determined to finish first! My son’s karate teacher calls this, “friendly competition.”
So, what other online actions helped?
Here’s what I learned.
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