You Can Help through Twitter no comments
© Alex E. Proimos
As our spotlights of great charity work online continues, I'd like to take a moment to talk about Twitter as a whole. Many charities have been successful raising funds through this avenue. Twitter can be a powerful engine of giving if used correctly. I used to tell clients not to expect Twitter to be a "buy now" button, expect in the cases where the button says "donate here." To purchase a project, consumers may be hesitant after a single tweet, but for a good cause, they'll click away.
The great thing about Twitter is that you don't have to be directly involved with a charity to help spread its message. That's what @YouCanHelp is all about. @YouCanHelp is a twitter account dedicated solely to re-tweeting other people's causes. You can send them a direct message or just mention them and they will send your message to the 3000+ followers they have. So combine your number of followers with theirs and you're reaching an extra audience you might never have connected with before.
@YouCanHelp lists Global Impact as its homepage. Global Impact is a humanitarian organization that's been around over fifty years and has started a number of smaller charities and raised over 1.2 billion dollars in aid to countries around the world. Just to give you an idea how big this organization must be, their website is CHARITY.ORG. Image how hard it was to land that domain!
The point here is sometimes the simplest thing you can do to help someone else is spread the word. The internet gives us millions of ways to share links, ideas and causes through simple email to social media to full-blown online campaigns. Its very easy to do your part in a small way. The internet has nearly limitless potential to help others.
Take a moment to follow @YouCanHelp! Do you follow other great charities or online outreach Twitter accounts?