Published by Peggy on 02 Jun 2009 at 04:58 pm
OpenWiser: A successful crowdsourcing fundraising effort
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On Monday June 1, the community beat its goal of raising $10,000 to help WiserEarth complete its API (or “application programming interface.”). The purpose of the API is to enable other organizations to access and display WiserEarth’s wealth of social change information through their own websites, opening up new opportunities for collaboration. |
On April 22nd, Leif Utne and Jon Warnow launched a campaign with a broad group of organizations and people to collectively fund the development of WiserEarth’s API. 5 weeks later and 102 donors later we have $10,319 to make this project a reality! Just as Leif has said, “This is a powerful, heartening example of the community coming together to benefit the whole of humanity.” Most of the campaign was conducted on Twitter, with over 110 tweets mentioning the effort. The most popular single tweet eventually reached 32, 242 people: “Socialpinhead: WiserEarth Members Create OpenWiser For Ultimate Green Networking …” Fitting WiserEarth’s global scope, donors came from across the world including the UK, France, Canada, the Netherlands, Australia, and the US.
On behalf of the WiserEarth community, I want to thank everyone who helped with this effort:
- Leif and Jon, amazing leaders!
- 28 tech leaders who lent their names to the OpenWiser appeal when it first launched
- Folks at CivicActions and ONE/Northwest whose matching grants helped build early momentum around the campaign
- 102 donors who generously contributed financially, especially in these hard economic times
- Over 2,000 Twitter friends of @WiserEarth who spread the word to their communities and friends
- Jaymi of TreeHugger for doing a piece: “WiserEarth Members Create OpenWiser For Ultimate Green Networking“
A beta version of the API is now available for WiserEarth Organizations profiles. If you would like to get geeky and create web widgets, please join the WiserEarth API Developers Group and help with developing, testing and documenting the API.
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Tags: API, Fundraising, Jon Warnow, Leif utne, OpenWiser, Twitter
4 Responses to “OpenWiser: A successful crowdsourcing fundraising effort”
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[...] Your page is on StumbleUpon [...]
[...] seeking to reach a community of potential investors using crowdsourcing as a method of fundraising. They are all publicly accessible applications and within each of those applications are a large [...]
[...] The campaign involved over 110 tweets and a few are shared here. For more information, visit: WiserEarth Croudsourced Fundraising Blog OpenWiser WiserEarth API Developers Group Hope to see you on WiserEarth,Twitter,@WiserEarth, and [...]
[...] fans, 800 subscribers on the WiserEarth blog. * Exceeded goals for our fundraising campaigns: OpenWiser and WiserTongues both surpassed their $10,000 targets * Witnessed the growth of the WiserEarth [...]