Turn a stocking stuffer into a donation this Christmas

Guest post by Shelly Lawrence
African Children’s Choir

The world famous African Children’s Choir is launching their Christmas campaign, Give Up a Gift for Africa.

The campaign encourages parents to make a donation to The African Children’s Choir as a stocking stuffer gift for their child. Once the donation has been made, the parent will receive a link to a printable Christmas card via email. Once they’ve printed it, they can put it into the child’s stocking as a thank you.

The card will allow parents the opportunity to talk to their child about the important message of giving, and to teach them about helping children less fortunate than themselves through donating the value of one of their stocking stuffer gifts.

Here’s where to donate.

Supporting the African Children’s Choir program

Money raised by the Give up a Gift for Africa campaign will go toward both The African Children’s Choir program and the many other programs run by Music for Life.

Music for Life is the official fundraising charity of The African Children’s Choir and works in seven African countries. During its 28 year history creating “ChangeMakers” for the future of Africa, the organization has educated over 52,000 children and has helped more than 100,000 children through its relief and development programs.

The African Children’s Choir travels the world, acting as the ambassador for Africa’s most in need children. They have raised much-needed awareness and funds for the education of the continent’s most vulnerable children, as well as their own education, as they go. They have performed on a variety of television shows including “The Ellen DeGeneres Show” and the live finale of “American Idol” season six and have sung at prestigious live events such as this year’s Diamond Jubilee Concert for the queen of England.

Ray Barnett, founder and CEO of the African Children’s Choir, said the Give Up a Gift for Africa campaign goes beyond fundraising to help educate African children and extends to helping a new generation learn the critical importance of supporting young people in need.

Interested in gifting?

If you would like to turn a stocking stuffer into a donation this Christmas for any of your loved ones, visit the Africa Children’s Choir website, where you can donate through FirstGiving.

Like the African’s Children Choir on Facebook and continue the conversation with them on Twitter using the hashtag #ACCGiveupaGift.

The post New campaign: Give Up a Gift for Africa appeared first on Socialbrite.

Today is my birthday, and in the tradition of other social media strategists working in the nonprofit space like Beth Kanter (I wrote about her last birthday campaign in January) and Geoff Livingston, I’d like to ask your help in making the day special for some enterprising young people in Colombia.

But first a quick word of explanation. This post comes in two parts: this introductory fund-raising appeal, followed by an interview with the founder and CEO of Jolkona Foundation, which is running the campaign and scores of others like it.

Empower young entrepreneurs in Colombia’s slums

This is the first time I’ve ever directly asked my blog readers and followers on Twitter and Facebook to donate to a campaign of mine, though I’ve spotlighted dozens of worthy causes over the years. So, please donate here — looking for nine people to donate an average of $25. Details:

What: Support young people in the slums of Bogotá, Colombia, as they develop their own community internet cafe business, called MegaRed (pictured above). The cafe provides opportunities for young entrepreneurs to create a better future for their families while providing a safe and positive environment for young people at risk of being recruited or attacked by armed groups.

What’s cool & different: Jolkona.org showcases scores of great causes to help out — and you get individualized feedback and progress reports on how your donation made a difference in people’s lives.

How much: We’re asking for $25, or whatever you can afford.

How: Click the Give button on this page. You’ll be able to track their progress in the months ahead.

Thank you! Please retweet or Facebook it if you can.

Jolkona: One-to-one philanthropy

Imet Adnan Mahmud, co-founder and CEO of Jolkona, during Beth Kanter’s book signing party for “The Networked Nonprofit” at TechSoup Global last month — and was immediately impressed by his seriousness and dedication to helping great causes through one-to-one philanthropy.

Jolkona is at the bleeding edge of this phenomenon, which will become an increasingly important part of charitable giving in the years ahead, as young people in particular want transparency, interaction and accountability when supporting a cause.

Adnan says Jolkona is the first nonprofit “to give tangible feedback on your donation.” Kiva, which pioneered the technique, provides entrepreneurs with loans. And while nonprofits like charity:water and Global Giving often give updates on projects, Jolkona is positioning itself as a technology platform that enables one-to-one philanthropy for nonprofits of any size.

Watch, download or embed our interview on Vimeo

The year-old Jolkona — which means “drop of water” in Bengali (Adnan is a native of Bangladesh) — currently showcases 75 projects in 35 countries, including the United States.

Jolkona’s premise is simple but powerful: Support a library in Tibet that needs $50 to buy books, and you’ll get the list of the books purchased through your donation. Help people in Bangladesh and Myanmar get an artificial limb for $200 — $200! — and you’ll receive a before and after photo. In Iraq, you can save a girl from an honor killing for $120: You get the story of the girl you saved, though for security reasons they can’t supply a name or photo. And in the U.S., you can provide field trips to a classroom of disadvantaged children in Seattle.

Says Adnan: “If you ask any nonprofit, Do you want to tell your supporters how their money was used, they’ll all tell you, Yes I do. But they don’t because they’re strapped for resources. Jolkona decided to come in and provide that technical infrastructure.

“Our focus is on youth philanthropy,” he adds. “We’re focused on galvanizing this next generation of givers. We’ve seen the frustration of this generation — that they don’t know where their money is going to. … We want people to feel that their [donation] can make a difference.”

It does, and the Jolkona team has gone out of its way to provide transparency and dispel worries that surfaced after last year’s revelation that Kiva wasn’t being forthright about its donations process.

Jolkona is now accepting nonprofit partners, though there’s a waiting queue. “If you are doing great work and are committed to showing impact, we are your best partners” as a platform solution, Adnan says.

The post Support my birthday campaign on Jolkona! appeared first on Socialbrite.

Global Hug Tour from JD Lasica on Vimeo.

I love stories like this. In Chicago last weekend I met Gail Lynne Goodwin of Inspire Me Today, who told the Business School for Bloggers gathering about her new project: the Global Hug Tour.

Gail and her husband Darryl — an ordinary couple from Boulder, Colo. — were sitting around one day and decided to make a difference in people’s lives around the world by launching an event that combines good vibes and charitable giving with the power of social media.

This fall they’ll be boarding a small prop prop plane, flying it more than 31,000 miles and visiting 50 cities around the world over five months. They’ll do three things in each location:

• Gather inspiration from local luminaries to share on Inspiremetoday.com.

• Give 2,000 hugs in each of those locations, “literally wrapping the world in more than 100,000 hugs,” Gail says.

• Give away more than $1 million to nonprofit causes in each of those 50 locations. The causes run the gamut from breast cancer and AIDS prevention and treatment to grizzly bear preservation.

Now, here’s where you — and the power of social media — come in: Starting May 11, they’ll begin raising $1 million (it could go higher) on the Globalhugtour.com site. Remarkably, the causes will be funded in $10 increments through the use of through social media, Twitter and other outreach tools.

“One hug in Chicago will feed three homeless people. Two hugs in Cambodia will pay the entire cost of educating a child for a year. 100 hugs in Chani, India, will pay the entire cost of open heart surgery for a child,” she says. “Just in Chani city there are 53,000 kids on a waiting list. It’s a crime to me to think that it only costs $1,000 to save a life. So that’s why we’re doing this.”

“Ten dollars won’t change your world,” she says. “Ten dollars will makes a phenomenal difference in the lives of the people we’ll be visiting.”

Like in other examples of Web 2.0 charitable giving, a donor can choose exactly where he wants the hug delivered and which of those 50 causes he wants to support. Smartly, they’re looking for sponsors and underwriters to cover costs so that 100% of all funds donated go to the cause and none to operating expenses. (Gail, if you haven’t discussed this yet, you should be using Twitter and tools like TipJoy to fund the project rather than just a destination website.)

She pointed to a 12-year-old boy who has raised $5 million for charitable causes, mostly online, and says, “If we really reach out to those who get social media, my goodness, what an effect we can have to make social media social first, but for social causes and social good, in a really powerful way.”

Gail adds: “Social media to me, first and foremost, is social. It’s about us reaching out with love and compassion and connecting to other people. … Share the love. Blog about it, write about it, tweet about it. Pass this on.”

A great idea. We’ll be doing that here at Socialbrite and hope you will, too.

You can embed this video on your own site by visiting the Vimeo page and copying the embed code. We’re interested in hearing about how this campaign spreads through the use of social networks.

Please sponsor a hug here.

The post Global Hug Tour appeared first on Socialbrite.