Late last week we kicked off a drive to raise $25,000 for http://www.charitywater.org/ — a non-profit that brings clean and safe drinking water to people in developing nations. We launched this over Twitter — in partnership with Pistachio and Tipjoy.
In the first 24 hrs we raised $944 from 144 people. As of today — Saturday — we have pledges of $1400 from 213 people, a total of about $2600. This is amazing, the money is going to have a very real impact on people’s lives. Unclean water is the cause of about 80% of disease. 43,000 people died last week from bad drinking water. $2600 in 48 hours is an amazing start, all raised over the Twitter platform. Of the $2600 about half of it was raised via Tipjoy. Here is a live update of the pledges to Charity: Water (@Wellwishes) via tipjoy, and the payment (vs. pledge) rate.
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You can add a $2 gift right here:
In terms the approach it feels like we are scratching on something radically new here. It intersects with a set of trends I am fascinated by: dynamic community formation and participation, the now web or real time cloud and micro-lending or in this case micro-giving. Laura Fitton (@Pistachio) has written about this before, as have others — its giving me a lot to think about as we head into the Christmas season and the snow falls here. A payment rate of 83% is astoundingly high.
We also put together a little video of the launch of this effort. Laura is testing, Chartbeat, an un-released product from betaworks — it can track the traffic surge from Twitter to Larura’s blog post. If anyone wonders the effects of Twitter this little video says a lot. Watch what happens 20 seconds in.
Laura had a technical reaction to the video:
holy AWESOMENESS.
chartbeat is going to be INSANELY valuable. that is SO cool.
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