Donate your Twitter background to charity, say ColaLife
Howard Lake | 21 February 2009 | Blogs
ColaLife, the campaign to use Coca Cola’s international distribution network to distribute life-saving medicines, has once again come up with an excellent way of capitalising on their supporters’ use of social media.
And it is an idea that is eminently replicable by any other charity.
ColaLife has just announced on Twitter that it is asking Twitter users to swap their standard Twitter background to one advertising ColaLife’s campaign.
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In Making use of unused space – can you help?, ColaLife’s Simon Berry says "By changing the background image to your Twitter page, all the people visiting will see information about ColaLife".
He offers a ready-made graphic to download, ensuring that ColaLife controls the campaign message, and explains in eight steps how to upload it to your Twitter account.
It is a wonderfully simple idea that capitalises on the large amount of screen space currently unused on millions of Twitter users’ pages – unless of course they really like the standard background designs on offer from Twitter.
Of course, quite a few charities have created their own, branded background on Twitter. But ColaLife takes it further by offering a Twitter background for other Twitter users.
I’d taken part in an earlier discussion on ColaLife’s blog about a similar idea – A href=”http://www.colalife.org/2009/02/06/would-you-change-your-facebook-picture-for-colalife/#comments”>Would you change your Facebook picture for ColaLife?. It had crossed my mind that the social media networks offered considerable opportunity to enable charities and campaigning organisations to make a sudden and dramatic impact using some of the basic ‘furniture’ of their standard pages – status update or icon being the elements that had attracted my attention.
ColaLife in typical fashion have thought on a bigger scale so congratulations to them.
Given the fact that there are now people and companies offering professionally designed Twitter backgrounds, it won’t be long before other charities are following in ColaLife’s footsteps and offering their own "support charity X" backgrounds.
Indeed, some charities have already started to something similar by offering supporters the chance of show their support with images on their i-Google pages.
The donate-your-Twitter-background idea has a number of qualities in its favour, not least the fact that, once implemented, I doubt many people will bother to change their Twitter background, so ColaLife’s message will live on on many Twitter pages for a long while.
But the major downside with the background idea is that it is only an image. You can’t make a Twitter background interactive, or even make any URL’s you list clickable. Readers still have to type them in to act on them.
As an image, there is no way to insert a widget or other active element, like a RSS feed, on the background. In addition, it isn’t possible to track the number of people implementing it: all you can do is track the number of times the background is downloaded.
Nevertheless it is a simple and creative idea, and an easy way to show one’s support.
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.