Twitter used to fundraise for Robert Burns Birthplace Museum
Howard Lake | 25 January 2009 | News
The National Trust for Scotland has launched a fundraising campaign using micro-blogging tool Twitter to raise funds for its new Robert Burns Birthplace Museum.
The Twitter campaign is running this weekend and will end on Monday evening. It is capitalising on today’s 250th anniversary of the bard’s birth.
Robert Burns already has a Twitter presence where lines from his poetry are posted daily. The campaign emanates from here, with supporters being encouraged to ‘follow’ @ayrshirebard, and ‘retweet’ or forward his appeals for funding to their followers.
The username ‘ayrshirebard’ was chosen, it seems, because all the other useful variations on robert and burns were already taken.
As of Sunday evening, the account had attracted 624 followers and had posted 364 updates or messages.
The National Trust for Scotland has raised £17 million for the Museum and is seeking a further £4 million.
The Twitter campaign asks for microdonations of $2. Donations are handled using Tipjoy and Paypal.
Trust Development Manager for Corporate Relationships David McKinnon said: “Burns was one of Scotland’s most consummate communicators and as can be seen on his Twitter site, his work translates well into Tweets”.
He claimed that this is the first time that Twitter has been used for fundraising in the UK, although plenty of other UK charities will probably dispute that. He admitted that he didn’t know how successful the campaign would be, but believe it was worth testing as an innovative fundraising approach.
Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said: “Twitter is a new way for people to communicate. The National Trust for Scotland has discovered a creative way to spread the works of Robert Burns and we’re flattered to be associated with such a pioneering figure.”
http://craig-mcgill.com/2009/01/25/a-birthday-present-for-robert-burns-give-just-2/
About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.