NGO's Rush to Twitter and Facebook

I feel absolutely refreshed after 12 hours of sleep! I bet you are having nice weekend with your friends, families, and perhaps lovers. Wish everyone a good luck:)

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   Recently, a number of non-governmental organizations joined social network services (especially, Facebook and Twitter) as a means to raise public awareness of the issues with which they are tackling and to spread their messages all around the world. Then, why are social network services appealing greatly to NGOs?

 

   People, when on social network services, collectively tend to behave benevolently. Because their profiles can be accessed freely by other people, including strangers, people want to be recognized as friendly, generous individuals. Thus, when NGOs post messages on social network services, people are willing to participate in such moves by clicking on “Like” on Facebook and “Retweet” on Twitter. It does not take a lot of time to click on icons, but that is enough to show other people that “I am keenly aware of my social responsibilities and I care about people around me.”

 

- Message Donation
   This is the most common type. Here is an example. The United Nations initiated a campaign titled “End Malaria.” In order to turn the campaign into a triumphant success, the UN selected 50 entities, both individuals and foundations, whose influences are powerful enough to propagate the UN’s social messages all across the globe. Those selected entities sent tweets regularly regarding the “End Malaria” campaign and those tweets were reached to about 170 million people. As intended, the UN succeeded in signaling its message that “we should not let children from poor countries die of malaria.”

 

- Channel Donation
   This type of donation is gaining huge popularity among bloggers these days. NGOs design applications in which people can learn about their on-going campaigns and actually donate money thorough online payment. Individual bloggers, after customizing applications to suit their blogs’ designs, put them on display so that visitors can participate in their causes. For example, Facebook Causes, a charity site on Facebook, suggests people to donate money on their birthdays to raise funds.