Happy #TweetsGiving! Day 1 Perspective

First of all, if you haven’t yet been to http://tweetsgiving.org, go now, I’ll wait.

The Scoop

So, Stacey called me on Wednesday night, with the name and twitter account for TweetsGiving, asking for ideas.  We settled on the idea of getting people to tweet their gratitude, and immediately began thinking about who we could bring on board to help make it happen. Today, after a lot of brainstorming and hard work by many amazing people, #TweetsGiving was a top trending term in twitter and our campaign is well underway to building a new classroom in Tanzania for Gideon and his classmates.

So many twitterers tweeted gratitude throughout the Twitterverse, demonstrating that social media can mobilize an outpouring of Thanksgiving. If you’re not on twitter you can still participate and donate to a worthy cause. Also consider sharing your gratitude in your Facebook status instead.

Here’s the graph of our presence throughout the day on twitter.

Wow. I’m feeling wow.

Yesterday I was pumped and today I am so inspired and happy that this project came together from a mere inkling of an idea six days ago. It has grown into such an amazing campaign.

I’ve been overwhelmed all day by the willingness of the twitter community to step up and get involved in this project. A search for the #TweetsGiving tag really demonstrates how deeply we’ve threaded twitter with gratitude. So far, we have raised over $4,000 (and counting!) towards our goal of $10,000. In just 12 of 48 hours!

This screenshot from this afternoon shows #TweetsGiving as the third most popular term (And there are over 4 million twitter users!).

Thanks!

Since TweetsGiving is about gratitude, I will say that I am so grateful to all those working on the project, especially my partner in crime Stacey and countless others who have reached out to me throughout the day. You rock! I am also grateful to the gazillions of tweeters and the 150+ people who have so far generously donated to TweetsGiving.

On a personal note, I am so grateful to have my mom and sister and so thankful to have all four of my grandparents active in my life. Since the election, I’ve been thinking a lot about all of the blessings that come with being an American. I will have more to say on that and about what I’ve learned from this project after Thanksgiving. I will definitely have more to say once the frenzy winds down. (But not yet! Keep it coming!)