TwitRelief: Bid for a Celebrity Follower

If you are on Twitter, you may have noticed the launch of the Celebrity Twit Relief Campaign for Comic Relief. The concept being: you can bid for Celebrities to follow you on Twitter for 90 days, they re-tweet one of your tweets, plus there is a chance to also win amazing ‘extras’ in a celebrity auction.

The #Twitrelief celebrity auction is in aid of Comic Relief’s work in the UK and Africa and ends on the 20th March 2011. The campaign is fun, easy to join in with and is a great idea for generating awareness of the event.

A special eBay page has been set up for the auctions and includes: a signed manuscript, a character named after you in the book and dinner from Emma Kennedy, a chance to hang out on set with Kirstie Allsopp and her Phil, Suzi Perrys Bike Jacket, Silverstone passes and meet up with the Perry, plus a walk-on part in the next film by Notting Hill writer Richard Curtis (courtesy of his partner Emma Freud).

Rocktimers have been invited to dig deep in their pockets after we received a tweet from our favourite Gadget Show presenter Suzi Perry. We can’t quite describe how very overjoyed we were (esp: @sarahgriffiths), when we received an @ reply followed by a Direct Message with a “X”. See above image.

To find out more about how you can contribute visit the Red Nose Day site here. Whilst mentioning #Twitrelief, it suits to let you know that we were impressed with their Red Nose Online Giving pages, enabling all the sponsored transactions to be sent in via individuals unique fundraising personalised pages. Nice work.

If since reading this blog you have identified that the celebrity you wanted to engage with is too expensive, then look for another one. Alternatively find out more about how you can donate and join in with the Red Nose Day activities here.

The Flashlight Search Marketing team at Rocktime, are always on the look out for innovative campaigns that use social media. We track other's successes in which we then seek to implement into our own. If you see anything fun or innovative in Social Media that we might miss, feel free to tweet us @rocktimesocial.

Author: Sarah Griffiths

eBay Launch Favourite Charity Campaign

A new eBay for Charity feature allows you to set your favourite charity on eBay, so that you can support them whenever you buy and sell.

To celebrate the launch of ‘My Favourite Charity’, eBay is awarding grants of up to £5,000 to the three charities that receive the most votes as favourite in September.

Visit My Favourite Charity to see which charities Tess Daly, Sharon Osborne, Helen Mirren, Roger Moore, and other celebrities have chosen, and then choose your favourite charity.

Ebay state that: “your contributions have so far raised over £19m in the UK. Along with the benefitting charities, we'd like to thank you for supporting good causes on eBay”.

We are big fans of the layout of the Ebay for Charity page, good mix of useful links, video and social media. Loving the ribbon idea too.

Learn more about eBay for Charity or follow them on twitter here.

Author: Sarah Griffiths

Fresh idea: Host a dinner party for charity

We subscribe to the latest news from Bullying Online, the UK’s leading anti-bullying charity and number one resource for people using search engines to find reliable information on a variety of bullying issues. Bullying Online recently let their subscribers know about a great new fundraising website, so sharing with you in their words what this latest fund raising innovation is all about.

“It's called Dinner4Good and allows you to raise money for us simply by doing something you enjoy - having friends round for dinner! To see how it works just go to www.dinner4good.com/bullyinguk. From here you can create and send personalised email invitations – takes less than 5 minutes. Your guests can then accept and donate online, so there's no awkwardness over asking for money or hassle of collecting cash. You can all see who's coming and how much is being raised – in a click. Dinner4Good takes care of everything, including claiming the Gift Aid which reduces the admin for us!
All you have to do is hold the dinner, eat, drink and enjoy yourselves! “

If you are a UK charity the Dinner4Good website appears to be a great way to potentially earn new funds and provide your supporters with a new opportunity to raise money whilst having fun. There are no set up or monthly fees to the charity and to remove doubt (due to charity sites receiving bad press) and encourage sign up, we were pleased to see that Dinner4Good have been transparent on who they partner with and how much money the charity will receive (for operating costs to run the site).

As a means of promoting this charitable site, if you are interested in holding a Dinner Party for charity or you are a UK charity looking for a new way of fundraising, we would encourage you to find out more about how the Dinner4Good website works. We wish all the best to the founder of Dinner4Good website Bryan Sergeant, great idea, great initiative, well explained, good work.

If you are a UK charity, that would like to make your own website more interactive to encourage participation in raising money from within your own site talk to our Sales team and we can bounce around some ideas.

Author: Micky Pain

Digital Media & The Haiti Appeal

The rise in usage of digital media technologies and increase in consumers being hyper-connected (Facebook, Twitter, Google Voice, Skype) has lent a helping hand to the opportunities available to share ways to help with the Haiti Earthquake Appeal. Through New Media image, print and text it has also helped us all feel a lot more connected to the situation.

Along with the sense of feeling connected, digital media has allowed people to:

• Easily donate
• Family members to connect with one another
• Locals to share their eye witness accounts via image and video and text
• Send relief to the right parts
• Share stories on Haiti to spread the word and convince others to donate

There are a number of digital brands also helping spread the word of the appeal including:
Apple, which allows people to donate directly through their iTune stores. Google have helped by providing a one stop resource for all things connected to the Haiti relief, with links to major charity organisations via their Google Checkout. Google have also teamed up with GeoEye a satellite imaging company to make available the most recent satellite imagery of Haiti.

The BBC have produced an online interactive map to show the routes that aid is getting into Haiti, view the interactive map here (also shown in above image), which illustrates each of the main routes for aid, from sea to air together with a short explanation on what is involved with each supply.

For more information on how social media has played a key part in the news from Haiti, we suggest you read this article from the Guardian.

The important part of writing this blog post is to point out, how much everyone in the digital age can have a huge impact on historical world events, whether it is sending out a tweet of the latest article you just read; encouraging your friends on Facebook to donate or sharing real time images from Haiti. We are certain that as digital media technology adoption increases the impact for future world events can only be greater.

For information on donating from the UK, we recommend you visit the UK Disasters Emergency Committee, an umbrella organisation for 13 humanitarian aid agencies.

Along with uniting agency efforts in times of disaster - such as flood, earthquake or famine - wherever it happens in the world and maximising funds raised to ensure they are spent in an effective and fully accountable way, we would also like to praise the DEC for their use of Social Media. The Haiti Earthquake was just a week ago and they are spreading their charitable good will via appeal on YouTube, images on Flickr and they are providing the charitable with the ability to connect with them on Facebook and Twitter.

We hope this blog post has helped spread the news further.


Author: Sarah Griffiths