Since the early days of the Facebook Platform, Causes has been one of the most popular apps. It’s also big on MySpace, and the company behind it recently announced that they had raised some $10,000,000 for various causes in two years. It makes sense; it’s using the social aspect of these platforms to spread the word on good initiatives. A new venture, TwitCause, from Experience Project, wants to extend that idea to Twitter.
And it’s possible that this idea could work even better on Twitter, given the built-in viral nature of the service. Basically, each week on Thursday, TwitCause has a new cause they support. They ask that you follow the TwitCause Twitter account and then retweet the cause to show your support for it. These tweets contain a link to go back to the site where you can find a place to donate money if you choose to, using PayPal. The number of retweets and the money raised so far are all shown in real-time on the page, as are the most recently tweets about the cause.
The service launched today with the The V Foundation as its launch partner. The V Foundation is a hugely successful cancer research organization named after the late, great basketball coach Jim Valvano. With his foundation attached, TwitCause has already seen tweets go out from several official accounts of NBA and WNBA teams. The hope is to get other high profile athletes like Shaq and Lance Armstrong involved and tweeting throughout the week too.
Going forward, followers of the TwitCause account will be able to nominate other nonprofits and causes that they want want to see supported by the service. Armstrong’s Livestrong is currently leading the pack for the next cause. TwitCause is also hoping that businesses and brands will want to get involved to sponsor causes as well, matching tweets with dollar amounts in support.
As I said, the viral nature of the retweet seems to lend itself well to something like this. Plenty of other sites and services have used Twitter to help raise money or awareness for good causes, such as Blame Drew’s Cancer, which we covered a couple months ago. They are now also working with Livestrong and have seen over 20,000 tweets blame things on Drew’s cancer in support of the cause.
1. Have idea
2. Add twit to the name and twitter “integration” even though it doesn’t really need twitter (just an easy place to piggy back off!)
3. Get funding
4. Get rich!!
Yeah right.
I am getting tired of these guys attaching the word twitter to everything that uses Twitter… but I guess whats the only way to relate it back to Twitter.
Still a good idea though.
Gee sounds familiar, they couldn’t have gotten the idea from us… noooo couldn’t be.
TwitCauses will go far. I actually find this a novel approach. Piggy backing on the V foundation and getting celebrity backing (you know everybody loves a good charity bake sale, especially famous rich people) will make all the difference. The celebrities have already, almost single-handedly, taken twitter to the masses. This should do the same for TwitCauses. Good stuff.
I’m suing.
That is all.
shouldnt be someone monitoring where the money goes to?
eplmania.com
twitter, twitter, twitter, twitter, twitter, twitter, twitter, twitter, twitter, twitter did this and twitter did that a day does not go by without twitter being mentioned hundreds of times…. its getting really annoying (sort of like spam)
I dare TechCrunch, or should I say TwitCrunch, to not post anything about Twitter for one week.
In my mind anything that people are doing where they put time and resources behind promoting a cause is noble and worthy of at least some of our attention. When there is so much crap out there competing for our mental bandwidth, I like the look for some examples of people *trying* to do good, even if it’s just a tweet play.
Take this campaign, for example:
http://www.endsma.org/twitter
And INCREDIBLY noble cause using Twitter to help cure a terrible disease. Sure it’s twitter but if it can help convince our idiot politicians to stop spending $800M on horse contraceptives and spend a fraction on curing diseases, why not leverage the Twitter?
twitter needs to fix their site i cant post anything. i have firefox 3.0 seem like they did some javascript changes that broke in that version of firefox
I also believe that is a very noble cause and the best part is it doesn’t necessarily require the support from the platform. The users are motivated to promote it and i think going by numbers it is already a huge success. Way to go…..
Sonal Maheshwari
USourceIT your single source for all IT needs
I just clicked here to say this: stop spamming the rss feed with twitter.
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all twitter apps are dead today, no idea how long they will be down as simple DDOS attack kills whole things, what is the use of one more app that banks on twitter!
So damn boring
WHole Experience Project is a giant waste of time.
We deliver you nothing but the best @ http://www.thessayist.com Check it out for yourself. You have to admit it is a revolutionary service.
They are doing a good job by helping the needy. We should support Twitcause and go forward and donate for a cause.
Um, they only have 523 followers. How is this breaking news?
Thank for writing about this, it’s further proof that twitter, facebook, etc. are about the people. The people are the platform. The services are the tools. And speaking of tools…nevermind.
I support the Twitcause concept and wish them well. I only wish my company, 10Beyond.com could generate as much talk as anything with the twitter name attached. We can help any Cause or Charity in the country by virally spreading awareness, creating new donors & donation. Anyone with email can benefit. Just take a look at http://www.10Beyond.com to see.