This week, some of you may have received personal appeals from P&G employees for a small donation in support of the fight to eliminate Maternal and Neonatal Tetanus (if you want to know a bit more about the cause, see this post).  Most of the online appeals were made to friends, family, and online influencers.  Our P&G team here in Geneva wanted to experiment with a program that had the dual objective of i) raising funds for a great cause and ii) learning about how social online tools can work together to quickly get the word out.

How it worked:  Several leaders within P&G (and external partners) were invited to help support the fundraising/learning initiative.  P&G set up websites for the different 4 teams using Justgiving`s outstanding fundraising service (more on this in a moment).  For example, my “feel n learn” team created a Facebook fan page, developed online videos, sent SMS and emails to personal contacts and attempted to do some blogger/Twitterati outreach.  All of our communication activity was directed back to our fundraising page at www.justgiving.com/pampersfeelnlearn.  The campaign was restricted to only a few days of activity (originally we only wanted to run the program for 1 evening).

Learning with Purpose: Those who attended the after work and were not as familiar with the rapidly evolving digital space took away some key learnings and, at the same time, supported a great cause…this was a good win/win from my perspective.

justgiving:  An impressive service:  There were several learning points for me during this unique event; I may provide more insight in later posts if there is interest.  I do however, want to briefly give a shout out to the team at justgiving.  If you need a way to quickly raise money for your cause online, justgiving does the heavy lifting and tracks everything.  After 10 years in operation, justgiving has helped over 6,000 member charities raise £370 million, mostly through their easy to use online fundraising landing pages.  They also have a nicely integrated Facebook widget and other tools to help anyone (and I mean anyone) quickly raise money for just about anything.  If you are not familiar with them, check out their website & blog to see what they have on offer.