‘Tis the season for charitable requests on Twitter, Facebook, etc. Over the next few weeks, everyone you know will be asking everyone they know to donate $$$ to Charity X. But there’s a fine line between a feel-good wave of DIY philanthropy and the kind of manipulative pandering that pollutes the very idea of charity.
Let’s call that line semantics.
Sometimes, your tweet about a charity is perfectly timed, expertly worded and will motivate the people who follow you to take action. And sometimes that request comes across as a shallow, self-indulgent exercise that draws more attention to you than to the people in need — and that’s a recipe for inaction.
If you’d like to avoid looking like a callous opportunist, here are three tips to avoid aggravating the very people you’re trying to inspire.
- Make it about the charity, not about you. Tweets like “help me raise $$$ for X” don’t call attention to X; they call attention to how much work you’re doing for X. And that makes you look like a glory hound.
- Don’t tether your cause to a hashtag. Yes, using a hashtag like #NameOfCharity can be useful in helping to spread awareness of your charitable endeavors. But stunts like “If our hashtag gets retweeted 1,000 times, we’ll donate $$$ to Y” invites cynicism from the populace, who’ll wonder why your quest to save the world is conditional upon us first inflating your ego.
- Celebrities: don’t make us beg. When you make decrees like “If I reach 1 million followers, I’ll donate $$$ to Z,” it not only ensures that the focus is on you, but it makes everyone else wonder why you don’t just donate that money in the first place. Seriously, if more kids die of malaria because your inability to crest 1 million followers causes you to bitterly withhold your malaria net money, that’s just pathetic.
Charity: it’s supposed to feel good. So stop making us feel so bad for helping.
Tags: audience, bullshit, common sense, perception, Social Media, Sociology, Twitter
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Peter Korchnak
