Category: Tibet & China

Mike Connery on Facebook Causes Giving Challenge

Youth vote and tech guru Mike Connery has posted his own post mortem on the Facebook Causes Giving Challenge at techPresident (and his own blog, Future Majority). I agree with Connery’s conclusion:

Most pertinent to youth organizers, this contest and any future iterations provides a model for organizational development that can at least begin overcome one of the most significant hurdles to sustainable youth organizing – building a donor base out of a young membership with huge amounts of disposable income, but very little willingness to spend it on political/activist causes. Very impressive all around, and certainly something to watch in the future.

Chinese Internet Dissidents

Today’s New York Times has a very interesting article about some of the internet dissidents in China who are discovering, creating, and publicizing ways to get around China’s Great Firewall. What’s particularly interesting is the way the article documents how people who were otherwise non-political were driven to activism in the face of repression.

In almost every instance, the resistance has been fired by the surprise and indignation when people bumped up against a system that they had only vaguely suspected existed. “I had had an impression that some kind of mechanism controls the Internet in China, but I had no idea about the Great Firewall,” said Pan Liang, a writer of children’s literature and a Web site operator who first learned the extent of the controls after a friend’s blog was blocked. “I was really annoyed at first,” Mr. Pan said. “Then the 17th Party Congress came, and I received an order that my Web site, which is about children’s literature, had to close its message board. It made me even angrier.”

Like others, Mr. Pan used his Web page to post solutions for overcoming the restrictions to some banned sites…

The article also makes clear that the levels of internet censorship are rising as the Beijing Olympics approach. Access to information is tightening, more Chinese internet police are being deployed, and the PRC government is cracking down on dissidents. The Olympics has had the opposite effect from what was promised by the IOC and the Beijing government: there is more censorship and less freedom as the government increasingly fears that the world will see that China is anything but a “harmonious society.”

What is sad, though, is that the Olympics could have been a moment for China’s communist government to genuinely liberalize, to open up their country to the democratizing forces of free speech, free press, and access to a free and open internet. Instead, they have promised that while arresting more and more dissidents, writers, and critics. The Chinese government has shown more of themselves in their illiberal actions than giving the world a candid view into their country ever could have.

Update:

The NYT also has a blistering editorial criticizing China’s march away from freedom in advance of the Olympics.

Facebook Causes Giving Challenge Post Mortem

The Challenge is over and Students for a Free Tibet came up just short. 4,522 individuals donated to SFT at least once over the course of 50 days. Remarkably, over 2,500 of those donations came in the final 24 hours. Even more remarkably, SFT received between 500-600 donations in the final hour, a number that would have put them somewhere between 7th and 12th place for the entire competition, had they received no other donations.

All told, SFT raised $93,944 over 50 days through small dollar, grassroots supporters around the world. At least a third of that money came in the closing 24 hours and they are still to receive a $25,000 donation from the Case Foundation for coming in second place for the competition. That total – $118,944 – is over 25% of the money SFT raised in their last fiscal year.

The whole process was a phenomenal success for SFT and the Tibet movement on whole. They proved that they are just about the most savvy online organizing group on Facebook, turning a student network into a major fund raising source in a matter of days and keeping pace with an organization that is at least four times larger. Kudos to all the SFT staff, Board, volunteers and supporters who turned this into one of the most – if not the most – successful and memorable giving campaigns in the organization’s history.

Thanks to all my friends, family, and readers who took the time to donate as well.

Huge Facebook Causes Growth for SFT

final hour

This is incredible. In the last 23 hours, Students for a Free Tibet has had at least a 100% increase in their total number of donors in the Facebook Causes Giving Challenge. It took 49 days to find the first 1,943 donors. The next 2,082 were found in just over twenty-three hours. This is remarkable, viral, grassroots work being done online.

If you haven’t given yet, please take a moment to donate $10 to help SFT win $50,000. The contest closes at 3 PM Eastern and there’s $50,000 at stake. I’ll tell you right now, this will go down to the final minute. Your donation could make all the difference.

Donate to SFT through Facebook Causes: http://apps.facebook.com/causes/view_cause/47691 

Thanks,

Matt

SFT’s Facebook Challenge

Facebook Causes has been running a giving challenge over the last 49 days. The contest, sponsored by The Case Foundation, has been phenomenally interesting to watch. The challenge is simple: what Facebook cause can collect the donations from the most unique individuals over the course of 50 days. There are smaller contests for you can get the most donors in a 24 hour period, but tomorrow the contest will conclude and the first prize of $50,000 will be awarded.

What’s interesting about the challenge is the groups that have engaged it. The lead for the total prize has gone back and forth for the last few weeks between Students for a Free Tibet, an organization that I have been working with for eight years (two years full time on staff), and an Oklahoma-based organization called Love Without Boundaries, which works with Chinese orphans.

The challenge ends tomorrow at 3 PM Eastern and it looks like it will go right down to the wire.

facebook causes giving challenge
My friends at SFT are running a live stream of their efforts organizing to continue to turn out donors on a new site called Mogulus. Their use of Mogulus is by itself an incredibly savvy way to drive traffic to their Facebook page.

The Tibetan Freedom Movement, SFT’s cause for the giving challenge, has over 4,750 members. 2,190 of those members have donated at least once, and counting. Since I took the screen cap five minutes ago, 150 more people have donated in support of Tibetan freedom. That is one of the highest members to donors conversation rates on Facebook causes. Over the last 49 days, SFT has raised over $60,000 through the challenge, including enough individual donations in 24 hour periods to win nine days.

Students for a Free Tibet is not a big organization. When I worked there, only four other people were on staff in the New York headquarters (now there are six staffers in HQ). In my years, the annual budget was around $350,000; it was closer to $400,000 this year. If SFT wins out in the challenge, they will likely have raised over 25% of their budget in 50 days, a truly incredible output for such a small organization. By contrast, LWB had a budget of $1.2 million last year, four times larger than SFT.

What makes the Facebook Causes challenge interesting is how it has driven organizations like SFT to put in energy to attract new donors. I’ve been able to get a lot of my friends and family to donate, in part because asking for $10 that can be turned into $50,000 is pretty easy. Beyond the small ask, SFT is small enough that the amount of money being raised and up for grabs in the top prize is great enough that it is worth the effort for the staff to put a great deal of energy recruiting more donors. No large organizations or their supporters are pursuing this prize (though the League of Young Voters briefly did).

SFT is doing really creative things to bring in new donors. Campuses around the world have tabled with laptops and wifi to get people to donate on the spot. There have been donation parties. Last night in New York, there was a happy hour* with laptops set up in the bar and people on hand to help facilitate Facebook novices to install the Causes application. People are asking friends and family – this week both my parents joined Facebook and donated to SFT. The contest has been an incentive to innovate and do outreach in new ways and SFT has clearly risen to the challenge.

Winning the Facebook Causes challenge and getting the $50,000 grand prize would also be remarkable for the fact that SFT has never received a single donation that large in its entire existence. Only once has SFT received a grant larger than $50,000. This is not a wealthy organization, but they know how to make every penny count.

With all that in mind, I’m pulling for SFT and will be helping them however I can. I hope regular readers of this site will consider donating $10 to the Tibetan Freedom Movement by 3 PM Eastern tomorrow through Facebook.

If you’re a Facebook member, just go to this link and donate: http://apps.facebook.com/causes/view_cause/47691. Your $10 could be worth $50,000 by this time tomorrow.

*The New York Times utterly failed to grasp the diverse ways SFT supporters are raising money. They described a “keg party” which didn’t exist (it’s unclear if it was the NY happy hour or a gathering in Montreal that had mentioned there would be beer and other refreshments offered). The NYT article gives no attention to why SFT was having success with its student donor base, nor did they bother to contact SFT to talk about what was being done to keep pace with the larger LWB. It’s my understanding that SFT is pursuing a correction to the Times article and will be submitting a letter to the editor in response to their shoddy and potentially outcome-changing article.

MLK Day

I went to high school in New Hampshire, one of the last states to honor MLK Day as a holiday. As a result of the state’s sad history of not honoring the fallen civil rights leader, my private high school had a tradition of not holding classes in honor of Martin Luther King Day and instead using the day to hold workshops on what I’d broadly describe as diversity issues. Subjects ranged from on campus ethnic tensions to gay rights to how Title IX works and so on.

One of the workshops I attended my senior year was facilitated by a representative from Students for a Free Tibet and was about the modern history of Tibet, the invasion by Mao’s Red Army in 1949-1950, and the subsequent fifty years of China’s military occupation of Tibet. The talk was given by Lhadon Tethong, then SFT’s Programs Director, but now SFT’s Executive Director. She’s a Canadian Tibetan, having been born in exile and grown up in and around Tibetan refugee communities, hearing stories from her family about Tibet, the Chinese occupation, and what it means to be a Tibetan patriot. These are the stories she told us on Martin Luther King Day in January, 2000 and something in me clicked.

Maybe it was that I hadn’t had the opportunity to think about Tibet in a full and authentic way before. Maybe I just was ready to give myself to a worthy cause — despite dabbling in work with environmental protection, the homeless, and anti-death penalty campaigning, I’d never found myself fully invested in a movement. Maybe it was hearing an impassioned, educated, clear call for help for the Tibetan people by a Tibetan (and not, say Richard Gere or Steven Seagal). Whatever the case, I was convinced.

I immediately got involved in my high school’s SFT chapter and before I new it I was participating in a relay hunger fast, helping fundraise for SFT’s international headquarters, interning at SFT’s office in New York, and taking part in protests outside the World Bank. I found it easy to devote myself to a cause that I saw as true and just and right. The Tibetan people in exile and inside Tibet needed help amplifying their voice for independence. I would do what I could to make it possible.

I started working for Students for a Free Tibet in a full time capacity in the spring of 2005. I worked for two full years doing operations and communications work before leaving to join the Dodd campaign. I’ve remained in close contact with my friends and coworkers from the Tibet movement and have no doubt that I will continue to work towards Tibetan independence as long as I have to until Tibet is free.

I say all of this and am reminded that my eight years working in support of Tibetan independence started as part of a celebration of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s life. I believe people have a right not to be treated as second class citizens, not to be silenced, not to have their religious beliefs banned or limited, and not to be imprisoned for voicing their opposition to a harsh military dictatorship. These are not extreme positions to hold, but ones steeped in democracy and respect for the rule of law. I believe this is work closely in line with the example set by Dr. King.