The Disrupt4Good team were one of the first onboard and embody in some ways many of the characteristics of the remarkable coalition of people working together to raise money for East Africa famine-aid with 50/50. For one thing, they had never met before but were brought together by a Good for Nothing hack weekend.
Here, Heidi Kikoler tells the story of their project, and how she linked up with developer Peter Hamilton to make Disrupt4Good:
The Disrupt4Good team is made up of two people who have actually never met. The Good for Nothing team introduced us. Heidi had the idea and Pete had the skills to code it. I had the idea for a disruptive twitter campaign that sent messages to the media that said “I gave a buck, now you give a f**k” while at the Good for Nothing weekend in London. The teams from Good for Nothing and Made by Many thought it had legs and so they introduced me to Pete who ended up leading the development of it.
It has genuinely been a collaborative experiment, with lots of emails back and forth and time on Skype. We’ve looped in a range of people to help us, from the team at Made by Many (you all rock!) for advice and design skills to an illustrator in Toronto who helped us with our initial design concept. Now that the project has been developed we are ready to promote it and get more people involved.
Both of us are working on this project in addition to our day jobs. Pete is a student and is a web developer on the side. Heidi works for Virgin Unite, the corporate foundation of the Virgin Group and helps the Virgin businesses in Europe develop their community investment strategies.
We’ve had some challenges around keeping momentum going. But the project is now at a stage where we can really begin to promote it. Now is when it is going to get exciting - with the 'fundraising phase' about to kick off and a network of other projects and teams to link up with!
In a nutshell, Give a Buck is a disruptive twitter campaign aimed at asking the media, primarily in the US, to start to give a f**k about the situation in East Africa. After making a small donation, twitter users are then given the opportunity to send a “I gave a buck, now you give a f**k” tweet to a select group of US media. The hope is that if we get enough people involved, we will make enough noise in their twitter feeds that they have to pay attention to us and the situation in East Africa. It is all an experiment – hopefully one that has a big impact!