How I'm Using Social Media for My Big Five-0 Kiva Birthday Challenge

I'm four days in to my Big Five-0 Kiva Birthday Challenge and figure it's time for a brief update. I've done the math and in order to meet my goal of $5,000 in loans (at $25 per loan minimum), I need an average of 7 loans per day. That means as of this moment, I'm a bit behind and should have 28 loans by the end of today. (Hint, hint!).

Current stats:

20 Member
22 Loans
$625 raised
12.5% to goal

However, I have not sent out a blast to my email lists of approximately 10,000 people. I'm waiting on that until closer to my actual birthday so I can get some momentum around that day. I have sent personal emails to key people in my community inviting them to participate.

I am using social media in a big way. Here's how...

First of course the obvious, blogging about the Challenge. Plus two team members (and former clients) have written about it on their blogs: Stephanie Calahan and William Reed.

Second, I'm using Twitter a lot. I'm sending periodic public tweets about the Challenge; I'm sending direct messages (DMs) to key influencers asking if they will support me and tweet about it; I'm acknowledging publicly on twitter the people who join and make a loan and include a link back to my info post plus I'm retweeting their tweets about participating (this is called social proof).

Third, I'm using Facebook. I've posted the link on my profile, on my fan page profile, and on various groups I both manage and belong to. When people comment on the link, I respond because that creates "viral visibilty" (as Mari Smith so eloquently puts it), meaning it pushes my link/message out to the friends of the friends who comment on my link. I will continue to post the link to my Challenge, every few days to keep it front and center on my profile.

I posted my video about what I'm doing on Facebook as well as distributed it via TubeMogul to several other video sites and included a link to the info in the description for the video.

I'm also keeping the members of my team up to date with progress by posting messages on the Kiva team page as well as on my Challenge page.

This was originally going to be a simple update, and I can see now that the tactics I'm using may be useful to you for promoting your events, fundraising, and product launches for that matter. It's an integrated approach, using all my resources to get the word out about a cause I care about.

Any more ideas about how I can get the word out? Would love to hear from you about successful strategies and tactics you've used to fundraise for a cause like this.