In the US Facebook and Myspace Causes have been one of the most popular apps. It has raised some $10,000,000 in two years.
Each Thursday, TwitCause announce a new cause for the week. Tweeters follow the TwitCause Twitter account and then retweet the cause to show support for it. Supporters can donate via a short link to paypal and the money raised and the number of retweets is shown on the TwitCause homepage.
The V Foundation is the first TwitCause and the service was launched on the 6th of August. The V Foundation is a cancer research organization named after the US basketball coach Jim Valvano. Because of the baseball/ celeb factor, TwitCause has already seen tweets go out from official accounts of NBA and WNBA teams. They hope to get high profile athletes such as Lance Armstrong involved and tweeting.
Followers of Tweetcause can nominate and vote for NFP’s to become the next weekly “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.
It will be extremely interesting to watch the impact of this new idea for direct online fundraising. The influence of the tweeter will be seen not only in the donations and matched funding but in the selection of the weekly cause. In addition the platform offers corporate an opportunity to gain advertising space through the twitter network by sponsoring a weekly cause.
Rather than using social networking for relationship building and then pushing supporters onto websites or offline events (like twestival) TwitCause will seek to use the viral/social/tell-your-friends aspect of twitter to raise money.
But with the limited number of active tweeters, and the same people retweeting a new cause every week, you have to wonder how fast TweetCause spam fatigue will set in.
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