The Summer of Social Good - Mashable Powers Tweet Funding of Non-Profits

Adam Hirsch

This admirable initiative is the brain child of Adam Hirsch, Chief Operations Officer of Mashable, the world's largest blog focused exclusively on Web 2.0 and Social Media news.

After the success of Tweetsgiving, Twestival and various other campaigns that leveraged the power of social media, Mashable thought it was time to do something on a large scale to not only give back to the community but to engage the community as well. Adam began progress on the Summer of Social Good in January of this year and has been working hard to create a campaign that is both engaging and rewarding for all parties involved. This week was the first of a series of Hyatt4Good events at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in New York City. Hyatt has donated the use of meeting rooms in four major cities throughout the US for the Summer of Social Good TweetUp events; where we met our guest today - Adam Hirsch.

New! Full Transcript of Adam's interview.

Founded in July 2005, Mashable is the world's largest blog focused exclusively on Web 2.0 and Social Media news. With more than 5 million monthly page views, Mashable is the most prolific blog reviewing new Web sites and services, publishing breaking news on what's new on the web and offering social media resources and guides. Mashable's audience includes early adopters, social media enthusiasts, entrepreneurs, influencers, brands and corporations, marketing, PR and advertising agencies, Web 2.0 aficionados and technology journalists. Mashable is also popular with bloggers, Twitter and Facebook users — an increasingly influential demographic.

Crowd Enjoys Good Food and Conversation at the #Hyatt4Good Summer of Social Good in New York City

Thanks to Zappos and MailChimp for sponsoring the Summer of Social Good. Their generous sponsorship funds campaign and event costs, meaning that 100% of your donations and ticket sales income can go to non-profit causes.

Adam Hirsch is the Chief Operations Officer of Mashable. Adam oversees Mashable’s business development, including marketing, partnerships, advertising and sponsorships, and events. Adam is a New York City native and a graduate of Cornell University.

Adam Hirsch Transcript

Peter Clayton: Welcome to TotalPicture Radio, the first podcast for career advancement, employment trends, recruiting and leadership development. You’ll find us on www.totalpicture.com, iTunes and now syndicated on jobradio.fm. Tune in and dial up your career.

Welcome to a big picture channel podcast on TotalPicture Radio, this is Peter Clayton reporting. The summer of social good is the first large-scale online charitable campaign to raise funds through the power of social media and the internet. The goal is to use the power of social influence via Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, blogs and other online media to raise an unprecedented amount after the success of TweetsGiving, Twestville and various other campaigns at leverage to the power of social media. Mashable thought it was time to do something on a large scale not only to give back to the community, but to engage the community as well.  Adam Hirsch, Mashable’s Chief Operations Officer began progress on the summer of social good in January of this year and has been working hard to create a campaign that is both engaging and rewarding for all parties involved.

01:10

This week I attended the first in a series of events at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in New York City where I met our guest today, Adam Hirsch. Adam, welcome to TotalPicture Radio.
                                    
Adam Hirsch: Yes, thanks for having me. I’m excited.

Peter Clayton: Give us the back story on this Adam. How did you get involved in doing this and how did you go about organizing it?

Adam Hirsch: I’m the Chief Operations Officer of mashable.com which is social media news source and resource on the web who are top 10 text blog, top 30 or so Twitter user with over a million followers on Twitter. And really this is one of my big projects that I started as you mentioned, back in January and I’ve been trying to think of what we could do for the summer and how we can do something that would be very community-oriented and get people involved and as you mentioned, Twestival and around February and Twestival was basically a movement to localize events and charity, fund raising abilities of local people to have them all be this ground organizers to raise money for one cost which was Charity Water.

02:18

So right around then, I had already kind of solidified sort of the idea of what I was going to do for this summer but that really with the success of  Mashable really let me believe that. With Mashable’s power and influence we were able to bring together a lot people as well. So move forward and you know, we have four charities that are equally benefiting which is Livestrong, which is Lance Armstrong's foundation. We have Oxfam America, we have The Humane Society of the United States and we also have WWF. We launched in June 1st and each week we are kind of having something new and engaging for our audiences and trying to find new audience as well to not only help with donations, but really to bring about the awareness of a lot of the charitable things that are going on on the internet and as well as our project itself and our charities who are heavenly involved on social media.

And so the event that you attended was one of my collaborations that I put together with the Hyatt Hotel chain and they have been gracious enough to donate space to us in six major cities, so you are the first one in New York and then we're going to Chicago and then Denver and there will be in California and they’ll come back to the East Coast  for DC and then in Boston. So that’s the Hyatt4Good Tour and then after that we’re concluding our Summer of Social Goods which ends on August 28 with the Social Good Conference and that will be here in New York City at the 92nd Street Y.

Peter Clayton: How did you go about choosing the four charities that are benefiting from this?

Adam Hirsch: Good question. I mean, there was a lot of back and forth between our team and some of the partners I was working with about who and how we should pick and really overall, it was kind of collaborate of decisions to make sure that we hit some of the key aspects and I was very adamant about making sure that we had some major organizations involved, not for their reach, but for the fact that they are already had all the people in place on the social media side and did what they were doing already and in addition have profound impacts on the world.

04:16

Each one of the four organizations really has a lot of power and clout to do a lot of change, obviously it’s not as easy as we all hope to do any sort of major changes, but all four organizations within the past two months that had some very big successes in terms of legislation and legal work, you know, within the United States or around the world. So they really have profound impacts on the world and I want to make sure that who we were working with really have the ability to spread their message and it’s more about the message of these organizations and what they are doing and how they are doing it, then it is about raising money at this point so we made sure that they were all on board and there were those that also equally benefiting each one of them so there’s no competitions, so that was also crucial thing that we had to discuss amongst all of our options.

05:03

Peter Clayton: And all of these organizations are very active in social media, they’re all on Twitter, they’re all on Facebook, they are out there and engaging their audience as it is. Was that an important consideration?

Adam Hirsch: Yes. It definitely was because we kept this first one behind the scenes until we launched on June 1st and well, there are a lot of great grassroots organizations that have a Twitter profile and because they’re using, you know, social media Twitter, Facebook such really well I really, really want to make sure that I had it dedicated person because smaller organizations never really had a dedicated person. So I want to make sure that I had somebody hands-on, who knew what was going on, plus also it ties into the conference end of August and making sure that we had the specific people who are the social media experts of each of the charities to be able to really speak and talk about how they’ve become successful prior to what we did.

Peter Clayton:  I know you have several sponsors that are helping with the cost of the food and the beverages and things that you are providing at these events.

06:02

How did you go about connecting with them and who are sponsoring this?  

Adam Hirsch: Well there is just really two main sponsors for the overall Summer of Social Good and that’s zappos.com and MailChimp, both of them sponsored whole series and also the conference and - so this way it’s a hundred percent of the donations are going to the charitable funds and that is managed by Global Givings so we didn’t want to have 10% of everyone’s dollars coming in and then we were using it on design work or we were using it on paying for the conference and they had no part, you know, they weren't even coming to the conference. So we want to make sure that the conference is all paid for ahead of time so that’s why every single ticket is a hundred percent donation to the charitable funds.

Peter Clayton: How much money are you expecting to raise throughout the summer going to the various cities and having these events at the Hyatt Hotels?

Adam Hirsch:  Maybe for about a hundred thousand dollars at this point by the end of the summer so, through the tour we will probably raise a couple of thousands of dollars, to the conference hopefully we raise at least the additional 20 or 30 thousand dollars.

07:03

Peter Clayton: One of the things I think is terrific about this is it cost me ten bucks to come to this event right? And I think anybody can come up with ten bucks and at the same time you feel like you are actually doing something beneficial for an organization. You have priced this at a point where people really can feel involved and do get involved in this and it kind of spreads.

Adam Hirsch: Right. Definitely, and that’s the goal and the percentages are quite interesting when you start looking at those numbers and you know, $10 is something that some people won’t blink, but at the same time, $10 is also a lot of money and to take, what we’re talking about in terms of social media and engaging of these people, it’s not only the conversion rate that you’d expect there are obviously a lot of issues, factors involved in this campaign and we’re definitely learning a lot of those lessons and we’ll definitely share a lot of those lessons at the end of the campaign as well.

Peter Clayton: That’s one of the things I wanted to ask you, Adam. What have you learned so far in organizing this and putting this together?

08:04

Adam Hirsch: Plenty of things. I’ve learned quite a lot and I believe that some of the major key factors really are that when you’re raising money in general and I mean I have spoken to - I think over, well over a hundred of organizations right now there really has to be a critical factor at times of sensitive issue. That was something that I did not think about , so that’s what the down sides to the lessons I’ve learned. I think the world is a critical issue to begin with but in a lot of issues that our organizations are trying to solve are all critical. But the positive lesson we’ve learned is really about how to kind of spread a non-profit related messages by Twitter and making sure that you have the right connections.

There really is a core dedicated group who are willing to spread your message, who are related to non-profit industries across the world who will definitely help you out and I think that’s a great lesson, is making sure that you are knowing all of the different organizations and people out there in the social media sphere of who can help you out.

09:04

Peter Clayton: Another thing that really fascinates me about this is, a year or two ago you wouldn’t have been able to do this. I think so much of  what this is about is the Twitter phenomenon and the social media use of Twitter and other sites like Facebook really has changed the way organizations are able to raise money.

Adam Hirsch: Right. Most definitely. It’s definitely something that will be talking about a lot about at our conference. What I recently said in an interview was that Twitter has line grapher and your audience becomes somebody who is interested in what your headlines are, but they’re just headlines with links to click through. So you need to make sure that - one, of your audience is the proper audience. Two, that your headline is grabbing enough for that specific audience to then direct them to whatever you’re looking to do, whether you saw them a post or an article, make the donation, attend an event.

10:00

Twitter is great for that because it is very quick, punchy, leader if you’re interested or you’re not and I think that’s why Twitter is definitely a great tool for a lot of opportunities and messages. Recently, as of yesterday it launched the new version of our site that’s summerofsocialgood.com or the short version is sosg.org based on feedback, well hopefully that will help us out. And unfortunately, it’s like the stock market. There is no one stop solution to figuring this out so it’s a lot of trial and error and hopefully you can learn from other people’s mistakes to grow further.

Peter Clayton: Now, is anybody else at Mashable involved in this beside yourself or are you really driving this train?

Adam Hirsch: Well, everyone is really involved. This is one of my projects so I’m spearheading it but yes, I make sure that everyone will follow. Ever since I first brought up the idea everyone has been very interested in helping and then have offered a lot of help so, they are helping me not only with some of the smaller tasks, but they’re also helped me create a lot of the - not just create but create and run a lot some of the week long campaigns that we’ve done.

11:08

Peter Clayton: And how has this all impacted the non-profits that you are working with? What are the kinds of thing that they’re coming back to you with as suggestions or as saying “we hadn’t thought about doing things this way”? Anything back and forth between the foundations that you found interesting?

Adam Hirsch: That’s a good question. You know I believed that some of the major things are just sort of the viral techniques, I believe is the best word to describe it. Some of the viral techniques is just simple little lessons as in use a hashtag, the characters under, you know, a hundred of characters or less so this way people can, you know, retreat you. But we’ve also done a lot of kind of outrage beyond the Twitter and Facebook levels and you know, we’re on LinkedIn and a couple of other sites as well. So we’re making sure that we are reaching our additional communities and I think just overall, I mean, we haven’t really come up with anything revolutionary, but I think we’re taking hints from other people and they’re taking some of hints from us.

12:06

Peter Clayton: Adam, I really appreciate you spending time with us today on TotalPicture Radio. Is there anything I haven’t asked you in this interview that you would like to share with the audience?

Adam Hirsch: Follow us on Twitter, twitter.com/socialgood and you can follow our hashtags with Social Good and you know, hopefully everybody can come by just if you Google Hyatt4Good in one word you’ll be able to find our tour coming up and Social Good Conferences is our event coming. So definitely, I hope we see a bunch of you there and thank you very much for the interview.

Peter Clayton: Well, thank you so much and I look forward to seeing you at the end of August at your event in New York City.

Adam Hirsch: Excellent.

Peter Clayton: Thank you. We’ve been speaking with Adam Hirsch, the Chief Operations Officer of Mashable. Be sure to visit Adam’s feature page in the big picture channel of TotalPicture Radio and that’s totalpicture.com for resource links and much more information. This is Peter Clayton reporting. Thank you for tuning in to TotalPicture Radio - the voice of career leadership.

Resources

Comments

Add New

Write comment

Name: Email:  do not notifynotify Website: Title:   Please input the anti-spam code that you can read in the image.

Powered by !JoomlaComment 3.26

3.26 Copyright (C) 2008 Compojoom.com / Copyright (C) 2007 Alain Georgette / Copyright (C) 2006 Frantisek Hliva. All rights reserved."