This is the first post in a new series titled, “Borrow My Blog.” I’m inviting non-profits to harness the collective brainpower of DISRUPTology readers like you to tackle a specific communications challenge.
It’s an easy way for you to participate with just a few moments of your time and help organizations without big PR and marketing budgets generate some new ideas.
Trolls, regular commenters, newbies…all ideas are welcome. Seriously, even negative reactions can sometimes lead to new ways of thinking about old problems.
First up is Paull Young from charity:water.
Organization: charity:water
Website: http://www.charitywater.org/
What They Do: charity: water is a non-profit bringing clean and safe drinking water to people in developing nations.
Communications Challenge: charity: water was born in September. Each year for our birthday, we team up with September babies and other supporters to take on something really big.
This year’s September Campaign will bring clean and safe drinking water to the Bayaka people in Central African Republic – one of the poorest and most remote countries in the world. Our goal is to raise $1.7 million with the help of individual fundraisers. 100% of the money raised will directly fund sustainable water projects.
We need to get 1,700 people to donate their September birthdays, and each of them to run a fundraising campaign worth an average $1,000 on mycharitywater.org
On Monday we launched some great video footage and a great story. I’d love to get ideas on how we can extend it – both for recruitment and to extend the campaigns.
Here’s the video:
My ideas: I figure it would be remiss of me not to contribute a couple of my own thoughts to get the ball rolling:
- Find more celebrities with birthdays in September and have them face-off online in NCAA bracket style against some of their fans to see who can raise the most money.
- Look for a sponsor to match donations for the month so that each individual needs to raise $500 and the sponsor kicks in the rest.
- Search for pro baseball players born in September and see if the ball club will make a donation at a home game and announce it on the diamond vision (thereby raising money AND awareness).
- It looks like you’ve got a lot of media and other corporate sponsors already. Maybe each of them can run one campaign for all the birthdays in their respective offices.
- September is also the beginning of a new school year, so it might be a fun way to get high school kids involved in doing charity work and “fun-raising”
If you’d like to participate, please offer your ideas and suggestions in the comments and Paull from charity:water will monitor and respond as appropriate.
If you would like your organization featured in an upcoming ‘Borrow My Blog’ series post, get in touch.
