The Philanthropic Family

Okay, the marvels of Twitter.  Hugh Jackman (aka Wolverine), who tweets at @RealHughJackman, is a philanthropic soul trapped in the body of a matinee idol*.  He’s offered to give $100,000 to one individual’s favorite nonprofit organization.  No 10-page grant applications here: you have the space of one tweet–just 140 characters–to convince him that your charity is deserving of the money.  Actually, since “@RealHughJackman” is 16 characters in itself, you only have 124 characters left, so make it snappy.  Haiku, maybe?

The generous actor has also suggested that he will announce the winner on Ryan’s morning show when he is a guest Friday, April 24th.  I’m thinking he’s referring to Ryan Seacrest, host of American Idol and, obviously, a morning radio show.  If your teenager is involved with a charity, what a great way for them to show their support and potentially get fantastic recognition from a pair of huge stars.

A Note to Mr. Jackman: First, wow, thanks for reading this.  I appreciate what you’re doing to inspire and encourage philanthropy and I can’t wait to see the results.  My husband and I are using some precious babysitting chits with my sister so we can see Wolverine on opening night and I love to see that someone can be a great entertainer and a great human being at the same time.

I hope you don’t think me too pushy, but can I offer a suggestion?

There are a few great nonprofits who have a highly organized online community, which is a fantastic resource they use very effectively in support of their mission. If they get wind of your effort they will easily get a few thousand people to tweet you shouting their praises.  I applaud them for building a community of passionate advocates.  But those folks always seem to win these kinds of contents.  The little organizations doing great work but who lack a well-organized online community can never be heard among the throngs of supporters cheering for the big dogs.

So my suggestion is this: don’t be influenced by volume.  Instead, find the single most passionate individual who writes the most compelling statement about their charity. It may still be a big organization who wins (Kiva-philes are crazy!), but at least it would give the underdogs a shot, right?

Okay, gotta get to work on that haiku in support of The Cara Program.

*Which reminds me of the funniest thing I heard in 2008.  Let me paraphrase from Joel McHale on The Soup: Madonna was quoted as saying baseball player Alex Rodriguez, rumored to be her lover, has the heart of a poet trapped inside the body of a world-famous athlete.  In turn, Rodriguez responded by saying that Madonna has the soul of a beautiful woman trapped inside the body of a velociraptor.

Tags: charity, contest, Hugh Jackman, philanthropy, Twitter

This entry was posted on April 15, 2009 at 2:34 pm and is filed under Involving the Next Generation, Raising Money. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.