To help celebrate the 2008 holiday season, Laura Fitton asked:
1. What can $2 do?
2. How can I thank and honor clients and friends of Pistachio Consulting this year?
3. What do I want most of all for Christmas?
These questions gave birth to @WellWishes, an effort to raise $25,000 (a mere $2 from each of her twitter followers) for the non-profit group Charity: Water. These small donations from the Twitter community would help provide clean and safe water supplies to villages around the world who desperately need them. @WellWishes chose to raise money for Charity: Water because, while easily taken for granted, clean water is a basic human need that has a dramatic impact on those without access.
- 1.8 million children die each year from diarrheal disease related to unclean water
- 2.6 billion people, many of them children, are impacted by lack of sanitation
- 4,500 - 5,000 children die every day from diseases that are easily curable and are not a major concern to those with clean reliable water supplies
Through partnering with @BetaWorks and @TipJoy, Twitter users were not only able to make donations via their own Twitter accounts and waive any fees so that all of their donation goes to charity, but many of their donations were matched as well.
