Wolverine Taps Social Net For Clean Water

On April 14, Hugh Jackman tweeted: “I will donate 100K to one individual’s favorite non profit organization.Of course,you must convince me why by using 140 characters or less.”

He couldn’t decide on one winner, so he chose two: Operation of Hope, a medical foundation, and Charity: Water, a non-profit dedicated to providing safe drinking water in developing countries.

Charity: Water president and founder Scott Harrison, tweeted the photo above, and added: “dear @realhughjackman — just snapped this near eritrean border at a school of 1400 w/o clean water.”

According to the Media Shift article that leads with this story, “Although the media is always abuzz about the latest corporation to open a Twitter account or YouTube channel, research indicates that it’s actually non-profits that are most likely to make a push into the world of online social media — and reap its benefits… Nearly half of the major charities surveyed made use of social media; in contrast, earlier Dartmouth studies suggested that only 8% of Fortune 500 companies had any social media involvement.”

Charity: Water’s Harrison is clearly tuned into the power of social media. Charity: Water posted daily videos of its well-drilling projects on the Twitter-based charity drive Twestival, and it was the first charity to use YouTube’s Call-to-Action feature. “It’s a powerful way to tell a story to hundreds of thousands of people,” says Harrison.

Charity:Water’s Twetival videos pull you right into the unbridled joy of African villagers getting abundant clear clean water for the first time.

Charity: Water’s featured video on YouTube resulted in about $10,000 in donations, which covers cost for two Central African Republic wells that will provide over 150 people with clean drinking water for 20 years.

Harrison noted that the trick to making a compelling case in 140 characters is to include a link to a three-to-four minute video. Ramya Raghavan, YouTube’s non-profits and activism manager comments, “Video has this amazing power to compel someone to want to take action in a way that just reading text wouldn’t. But non-profits have to up their game since so many users have interesting videos.”

James Norris of Social Uproar, a blog that monitors charity use of social media, posted a list of suggestions for charities hoping to encourage donations with online video, including:

> Watch and research other charities’ videos
> Make your video interesting
> Include a call to action at the end
> Seed the video using relevant keywords and descriptions
> Let your user base know that the video exists by sending out an email with a link to the video
> Once you have the embed code seed it on social networking sites (Facebook, MySpace, blogs, etc.)
> Encourage people to share the video

For Harrison, the advice for charities using social media was even simpler: “Just do good work and produce quality content.”

Thanks to Mike Rosen-Molina for his great article. He is a Northern California freelance reporter and an associate editor for MediaShift. A graduate of the University of California at Berkeley schools of journalism and law, he has worked as an editor for the Fairfield Daily Republic and as a managing editor for JURIST legal news services.