I think that one point is: how many people are reached with the announcement. If the “advertisement” for the campaign is poor, the resulting “donor clicks” will be poor, too.

But may be I did not understand it.

I agree with conclusion #3. As someone who only checks my RSS feeds every few days I was pretty confused by the posts and tweets. It was unclear to me: was I getting $3 or $12? Did I have to sign up for something in order to get the donation coupon? Was it still happening? Was it only for new followers?

Anyway, kudos on the experiment. Though it may not have done as well as you hoped, getting $8k to a worthy cause is still very commendable. I fully expect that with this new knowledge you’ll totally crush your next endeavor. I’ll be waiting – and maybe I’ll check your blog more often. =)

In the classic 1959 study by Festinger and Carlsmith, test subjects were paid to tell others that a tedious experiment has been interesting. Those who were paid $20 to tell the lie continued to believe the experiment boring; those paid a mere $1 to tell the lie were liable later to report the experiment interesting.

Summary: our past actions affect our self-image, and in the absence of especially salient incentives, our brains remember what we say or do as “choices”. Our actions become part of our unconscious self-images, which significantly influences our future behavior.

Great post! I’m planning my own experiment in using social media for charitable fundraising, but am struggling with a things. Among the factors that made your social media campaign, the 3 most important seem to be: capital, matching sponsor, and a trustworthy recipient organization. Here are my questions:

1. How do you recommend pulling off a campaign if you don’t have the kind of capital that you have? You put it $20k of your own money. We only have a couple thousand and need to make it all back…

2. How did you go about securing a sponsor to match your donation 2-to-1?

3. How did you go about committing to donorschoose.org? The recipient organization would not only have to be trustworthy from an operational standpoint but also has to be prepared to handle the influx of money, online traffic, information requests, etc. What do you recommend?

Thanks,
Jon