I’m an avid user of LinkedIn, and today I saw a question that caught my attention and interest — enough so that I wrote up some thoughts and ideas.
The question is:
What are effective methods for raising money for charity in an event or adventure-driven manner?
I’m currently on a solo, round the world motorcycle trip for charity. I am raising money for the Alzheimer’s Association, the Pulmonary Fibrosis foundation, and RAINN. Currently I have a website setup for blogging and displaying pictures from my travels. I’m looking for ways to use that site and my trip to raise money for the 3 aforementioned organizations. I’m looking for ideas like allowing those who donate to use my pictures for commercial use, hiring myself out for travel journalism, charging admission to slideshows after the trip has concluded, etc.
The site is viewable at:
Several other LinkedIn users provided some good ideas and suggestions, but I didn’t see anyone mention Facebook Causes, as well as some other viral marketing resources available out there. Here was my answer:
You have a lot of important and valuable insight in the other responses above, but one idea I didn’t see is for you to set up a Facebook page and a Facebook Cause page. Facebook Causes already allows you to collect funds for charity, and with a facebook page, you can provide a viral tool for people to let other friends know about your charity fund raising efforts.
Its a great place to upload pictures, updated, and link to your blog — as well as to the charity sites and donation pages.
Related to that, make sure to ad a “tell a friend” or “email this page to a friend” tool. You want to empower those supporters that already believe in you and make it easy for them to recruit more donors and supporters for you.
The YouTube video clips idea is a great suggestion — I’ll add another tip. Use Flickr to upload pictures of people you meeet, place you visit, etc. Keep a sort of “picture blog” on Flickr. The power of Flickr is that it has viral elements to it which allow current supporters to spread the word.
All these things, by the way, should include links back to your main blog and donation pages. This will all help increase your organic search engine rankings, which in turn can make your web efforts more visible and easier to find.