 40 days ago I launched this Campaign to raise US$25,000 to build a school in Laos. I gave myself 12 months to raise $25,000. It's been 40 days, and the campaign has raised over $21,000. We're just $3,625 short of building a school! BIG THANK YOU TO ALL THE SUPPORTERS, ESPECIALLY THE ANONYMOUS DONORS FROM TWITTER. The campaign has gone so well that Pencils of Promise have asked if I will partner with them for their holiday special - Season of Promise - where they are committing to build 30 schools over the holiday period. I am offering to go to local schools to teach website design, graphic design, social media marketing - all the tactics that have worked for me in driving donations over the December school holidays. I think that asking a child "if he's willing to give up his Christmas presents so that a less fortunate child can have a pencil" is a good way to educate them about children that don't have schools to go to and can't read or write. It's also a good test of character and a great way to teach empathy and social responsibility. If anyone is interested in being a part of the 'Season of Promise' campaign, please get in touch! Thanks again for your support! 
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 It's been exactly a month since I launched this campaign, and almost $14,000 has been raised, thanks to the contributions of 53 generous individuals. THANK YOU ONCE AGAIN TO ALL THE SUPPORTERS! The rate at which donations are coming in have slowed down, but I'm still getting at least one donation a day which I am very grateful for. Based on the latest data, the projected date for achieving my campaign target has been moved back 2 days to 30 November 2015.  The value of a TweetOne of the amazing things that I've noticed is an increase in the number of anonymous donations after I posted my one-size-fits-all hack on Twitter as well as on Medium. Twitter is the only social media channel that I am actively using to promote my campaign to the public (my Facebook profile is limited to friends only and my Facebook page is also only followed by friends.) On hindsight, I should have appended UTM trackers to the Medium post to see how many of them ended up on this website, but unfortunately, I didn't so we'll just have to lump Twitter and Medium together (largely the same anyway but it would have been nice to know if Medium helped generate more donations). (If you are one of the anonymous donors and disagree with this assumption, feel free to correct me in the comments below.) This means that almost 10% of my donations have come from Twitter.The average donor from Twitter for @debbiediscovers is worth $147 - Tweet This: http://deb.bi/ValueofaDonor-Tweet-This  Based on the number of tweets my post generated (15 tweets from the website and 15 retweets from Twitter), the value of my Tweet is $40.67. Compared to recent research done by Klear, "How much is a Tweet worth for a Kickstarter Campaign" where they estimated the value of a tweet to be $14.30, the value of a tweet for my campaign is 2.8X higher.  Each @debbiediscovers tweet can potentially add $40 to your fundraising campaign - Tweet this: http://deb.bi/AddsValue-Tweet-This (Note: This is not a pure apples-to-apples comparison; there are slight differences in methodology, Klear takes total amount raised by the Kickstarter campaign divided by number of mentions, and to level the playing field for campaigns that have been running for different lengths of time, they normalised the value of the tweet by dividing it by how long the tweet has been live for. I exclude all other donations (because I know exactly where they came from, be it a direct ask or from my Facebook account), and only include anonymous donations that are most likely to be from Twitter. I also don't normalise it.)
Special shoutout to Andrew Coppin from Sydney, Australia, who was my 8th donor (lucky 888 Mr Coppin!) and my first Twitter donor. Who exactly are my Twitter followers? As of 11 Nov 2015, my 2,942 Twitter followers are:
I suspect that a significant portion of my followers are Entrepreneurs, Investors, VCs, Angel Investors, Startup Tweeps
 If you are a US marketer, the amount of data that you can derive from Twitter audience insights is pretty amazing Compared to the overall Twitter community, my followers are also:
 But how accurate is Twitter Audience Insights?1. Country data from Twitter is not accurate: it does not tie in with Regional Data or Wireless Carrier data
I've also noticed substantial discrepancies between what Twitter, SocialBro and Klear report. For USA followers:
2. My initial hypothesis was that looking at Twitter's Audience Insights on Wireless Carriers should give you a more accurate picture: Based on that (see Chart below):
3. If you add it up, that's 99% of my followers which does not make sense either
4. Even something as basic as Gender has substantial differences:
(BTW, Klear- care to give me a free upgrade or a View of my Demographics to add to this analysis?) :) These differences are pretty substantial, which leads me to question the effectiveness of geo-targeting (or any kind of targeting) using Twitter Ads, especially for non-US advertisers. Twitter follower growthMy latest follower count is 2,942. Not bad for someone who's only been on Twitter for 6 months. I gained my first 1,000 in 2 weeks and the last 1,000 in the last 2 weeks. The period in the middle was when I was experimenting with techniques that didn't work. Using SocialBro's Benchmarking tool (which ROCKS!), compared to Social Media and Marketing Tweeps who I assume are the most sophisticated Twitter users, I'm listed 206 times, vs an average of 9 and I have a much higher growth trajectory. :) Using Followerwonk's Comparison of Users tool, you can see that there's almost no overlap in my 3 user accounts. If you add up all my Twitter accounts, I have a total unique Twitter audience size of 4,809. And you should see my latest one which has been listed over 500 times. :p) Wanna know my secrets? Make a donation and I'll reveal as much as your donation is worth.. LOL! (And don't bring the Twitter average down :p)P.S. For the Tweeps that have read this already (and thanks for Clicking to Tweet!), I've updated the click links. After painstakingly adding links to every single individual component of my Tweet This graphic on Canva, I realised that it doesn't work when pasted into Weebly's blog, though I have added a link to the graphic so you can click on that. Also Add SumoMe's Share Image Plugin would love comments on whether you like it or not 
 Some interesting and /or amusing facts about my campaign:
Other interesting insights that I gathered from research that I did: 1. Men donate competitively - if they see large donations by other men, they tend to donate more 2. This amount increases if the fundraiser is an attractive woman    Based on a projected trendline, I will hit my target by 18 November 2015, which is crazy and beyond my wildest dreams. I am now working with Pencils of Promise to set up their Singapore charter to get more organisations and individuals to launch campaigns for them. Please let me know if you or your company would be interested in launching a campaign too! Once again, thank you to all my supporters and all my FUTURE supporters ;) Debbie |
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DEBORAH KAYThis is a simple blog to track my fundraising activities and to keep family, friends and supporters updated on my progress. Archives |
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