My friend Simon Painter and I have been at it again.
We set up a simple debate - are beards good or bad? - following a long history of banter over my beard, and Simon's opinion that it should be removed.
We set up our justgiving page
www.justgiving.com/bearddebate and started tweeting with the hashtage
#bearddebate The idea was simple: when people donate, they leave a comment either for or against beards. Come the Institute of Fundraising awards (
for which we are shortlisted) we will tally up the results. If the beards have it, Simon will grow a beard for three months, and if the no beards have it, I will be clean shaven for three months.
As you can see on the JG page we had an initial video on You Tube. Since that video, Simon made one,
Vote NO to beards to which my obvious reply was
Say YES to beards
Our biggest break came from involving the blogosphere. Many emails were sent, and
PZ Myers author of
Pharyngula responded to mine. Pharyngula often has a category of "Pointless Polls" where he encourages his 70,000+ daily readers to go to an online poll, and skew the results away from the original expected outcome (for example polls questioning whether evoultion is true; or the rights of same sex couples to get married, for example).
As you can see here in his post "
To beard or not to beard" he not only advertised our debate, but also offered to put his beard on the line and take part. Since that blog post, he started a "
Great beards" series of posts.
The Register,
Speak Before Thinking and
The Rather Friendly Skeptic picked up the story too, and in the last two days, over £1,000 has been raised for Barnardo's.
With just a few emails (making sure to make the email relevant to the reader), a lot of tweeting, and some quite simple videos, it's been a great success!
And of course, the vote is still open, so,
is it beards or no beards?
Social media and fundraising case study
