Archive : November 2011

In March we launched Holler Gram, an app that turns your iPad into a glowing sign and simultaneously tweets into a predefined hashtag. It was perfect for conferences and we only did it as a bit of fun - which is why we are amazed that it's now been downloaded 45,000 times.

It's still being used by people all over the world and of the many fascinating uses people have found for it, the most humbling is from Australia where a group of teachers got in contact with us to say they'd been using the app to teach deaf children.

Lately we’ve been thinking a lot about how the 50/50 campaign is going.

Both Tim and Andrew have recently posted some great reflections on where we’re at and what we’ve learnt from doing this. On Wednesday evening, a bunch of the people who have been involved in running 50/50 projects came over to our office to talk about what’s working, what’s not (erm…PR?) and what we can do better.

So what did we come up with?

At the end of last week Tim asked us what we'd learned from 50/50. Confronted with such a seemingly impossible question, I floundered.

Stepping back a bit, what is it that we were trying to learn? As he puts it:

"We've all been trying to work out how to leverage networks and new models of digital engagement to raise money for famine relief."

Yesterday @malbonster and @bobbyc had the honour of accepting a Tomorrow Award  for Skype in the classroom, a  service and technology mash-up that connects teachers around the world and helps them collaborate on Skype-based teaching projects.

We are thrilled that Skype in the classroom has been recognised, and we’re especially happy for our client, Skype, with whom we enjoy a strong partnership. 

The coalition of projects affiliated with the 50/50 campaign has raised nearly £25k (that’s around $39k in USD), which is an amazing achievement.

True, we’re nowhere near the £1m mark at this stage but we still believe there is the potential to raise lots more money, and our plan was to learn and iterate towards this. There is an extraordinary coalition of (almost) 50 little experiments created and run independently by individuals and teams. Fundamentally, we are trying to understand how distributed teams of Internet-empowered people can take the initiative in terms of fundraising instead of relying exclusively on traditional institutions. We’ve all been trying to work out how to leverage networks and new models of digital engagement to raise money for famine relief

So, now is the time to review what we’ve learnt and pivot: to correct our course and to optimise what we’ve got.