Using Twitter in fundraising

This is a two part posting from an article by Marc Pitman. Add it to your fundraising ideas and have fun.
Twitter is a great free tool that can transform your approach to fundraising. And in a time of economic uncertainty, a free tool is a welcome help!

Twitter: A Brief Introduction

At its most basic level, Twitter is called "microblogging." Users are allowed 140 characters to answer the main question on the Twitter home page: "What are you doing now?" When you first start to tweet, it feels really odd. Why would you share what you're eating? Why would anyone care? It seems like it is only useful for narcissistic people or those trying to waste time. But people do. And the conversations get even better when you start answering a question like "What are you focusing on?"

People use Twitter to ask questions, follow people that are interesting, promote links to various websites, share news stories, to coordinate events during conferences. Forbes reports that people are even using Twitter to provide real-time disaster relief information.

Twitter for Fundraising

From a fundraising perspective, Twitter is an amazing way to engage donors and potential donors. One of the hardest things to do as a fundraiser is to maintain relationships. Twitter allows you to do that...right in the midst of your normal every day routine.


You can meet people all over the world that might be interested in your cause.
You can hear what people are really thinking about a wide variety of issues.
You can follow other fundraisers and get great real-time advice.
You can even promote traffic to your website or those of your friends.
Better still, if you can make your comments effectively understood in 140 characters, think about how all your fundraising writing will improve! You are forced to be succinct and understandable!

Tools like TwitterFeed automatically broadcast your blog posts through your Twitter account. Then your blog posts reach both those subscribed to your RSS feed and those following you on Twitter. And if anyone of them like it, they may "retweet" it, broadcasting to the people that follow them.