The eduFire Blog

Last Thursday night we all did something really fun on Twitter. Koichi was running one of his Twitter classes that night and we wanted to do something fun that would get people using Twitter. Earlier in the day we had given away a few free classes and T-shirts but I thought it would be neat to use Twitter to help out one of our favorite charities, Room To Read.

I was first exposed to Room To Read a couple of years ago when I read John Wood’s excellent book Leaving Microsoft to Change the World. Wood’s story of leaving a high-profile (and well-paying!) corporate job to help improve literacy in the developing world is incredibly inspirational. As someone who is very passionate about bringing world-class educational opportunities to those who are less fortunate it resonated strongly with me.

On Thursday night we decided to use Twitter to raise some money and awareness for Room To Read. KyNam Doan does a great job of summing up what went down in this blog post so I’ll just provide the quick details here. Basically we put the word out that for about an hour and a half we were willing to donate $1 to Room To Read for everyone who re-tweeted our message. This was a little bit scary because we didn’t cap the amount so in theory we could have had thousands of people re-tweeting the message in that time span (lesson learned there…probably a good idea to cap stuff like this!).

What happened was awesome to watch. We dm’ed a few folks who we thought would want to re-tweet but for the most part we just put it out there and watched what happened. It was really cool to see the viral effect as people passed this along to others. What was awesome too was to see people checking out Room To Read. Even more impactful than the money that we’re donating is that hundreds of people heard about Room To Read, most of them likely for the first time.

At the end of the day we counted 186 re-tweets (we decided to include re-tweets that came in after 9 PM PST as well) and so we’re rounding up and donating $200 to Room To Read. To help track re-tweets we put the #edufire hashtag in the post and were pleasantly surprised to see the hashtag show up on the homepage of Twitter Search that night.

Yup, there we were, right next to Blago, Obama and the Super Bowl. :)

We really had a lot of fun doing this and probably will do it again sometime. It’s a great opportunity to shine a spotlight on a deserving educational non-profit and there are a lot of them out there (e.g., Curriki.org, Donors Choose, etc.). And it’s a good way for the community to come together and do some virtual and viral good.

Thanks to all who helped us out be re-tweeting and definitely go check out Room To Read and see if you can help them out in any way!!

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Tags: Charity, RoomToRead, Twitter