Angela+Jackson's+Article+Page

** September 9, 2014 **
 * Submitted by: Angela F. Jackson **

** Each One, Reach One, Give One = The Power of One ** ** A Social Media Fundraiser ** Each One, Reach One, Give One = The Power of One, was to be a social media fundraiser for Holy Rosary Catholic Church, Richmond, Virginia, of which I am a longtime member. Holy Rosary is small inner city church with about 300 registered families. The thought process behind implementing a social media fundraiser was that we could tap into an entirely new segment of the population; a segment other than our parishioners who are tapped out by previous fundraising activities. There are a number of our parishioners with various social media accounts who would be able to participate in the fundraiser by simply asking their Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram friends to give $1.00 or more through PayPal. Plans would be in place to assist those parishioners register for any account that they did not have but wanted to have so they could join the social media world. With people having access to Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Linked In etc, and if you subscribe to the theory of six degrees of separation, our church community could reach out to a lot of people. [|Six degrees of separation] is the [|theory] that everyone and everything is six or fewer steps away, by way of introduction, from any other person in the world, so that a chain of " [|a friend of a friend] " statements can be made to connect any two people in a maximum of six steps. My first step was to introduce this concept to our pastor, then to the fundraising committee, and then the parishioners. I was able to accomplish two of those steps. My previous experience with fundraising on the parish level or on the diocesan level has been that pastors need to be on board for any new and innovative idea to be a success, and because our pastor at Holy Rosary is not yet comfortable with technology, that proved to be difficult. My work was cut out for me getting him to simply imagine the possibilities! The next step was to present the concept to the fundraising committee. I was pleasantly surprised that when I introduced the concept of a fundraising campaign through social media. They got it. They understood that by asking each one of parishioners to reach out to their circle of influence and ask them to give $1.00, this was not some grandiose idea but was actually doable. I showed them my [|Aminoto video] and that sealed the deal with the committee; they were on board! They saw the possibilities. I systemically laid out the details of the campaign by using the Web 2.0 tools that I had learned to use in my DDBC class. I showed them various ideas using Wordle that would be the teasers for our campaign. The teasers would be on our parish monitors, in our church bulletin, on our church website, and on our church Facebook page. We would create a buzz about Each One, Reach One, Give One - The Power of One and in this year of evangelization everyone would wonder what is this about! Next, I showed them the first [|promotional video]. A simple video introducing Each One, Reach One, Give One - The Power of One. They loved it. This video would be on Facebook, Twitter, and could also be emailed to various groups and organizations. Next, there was a [|video] which included the scenes from the first video but showed a little more about the ministries that have been supported by the continued generosity of previous fundraisers. The video also showed the results of previous fundraisers, as well as the faces of the fundraising committee. It was very clear to me that with over 1,000,000 parishioners in our diocese, and with their history of generosity, we could raise enough money to fund the ministries that were important to an inner city parish. Now, with that being said the campaign ran into a few roadblocks. The main roadblock was the reluctant use social media for fundraising by the parish leadership. What I found was that even though I submitted a written proposal of the campaign, it was not convincing enough for someone who did not share the same excitement that I did about how powerful social media is and can be when used effectively and efficiently. While this campaign did not happen during the time frame of this class, I believe it will eventually happen. Perhaps starting out a little smaller, therefore allowing the digital immigrants in our parish to see that this really can work and be beneficial if we work the plan is the way to go next time. Finally, let’s look at the potential of using just Facebook for this fundraiser. When this project was first conceived Holy Rosary had less than 100 likes on its Facebook page. Announcements have been made encouraging the parishioners to visit and like our page. We currently have 340 likes on our page. Using those numbers and the theme Each One Reach One Give One below are the possibilities: The average person between ages 25-55 has appromixately 285 friends. That is a potential of reaching 96,900 people. Now if each one of those people donated $1.00 that is $96,900. It may be a little unrealistic to expect everyone contact to donate a $1.00 so let consider using the 80/20 rule. Expecting about 20% of those contacted to donate a $1.00 the dollar amount would be $19,380. Perhaps with the recent success of the ALS Bucket Challenge going viral and being so success will make my next presentation of this campaign more successful.


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