Girls Can: Social Fundraising

Fundraising is broken. More people than ever are in need, but on the street, fundraisers are ignored. We wanted to make helping social and fun again. Plan supports girls in developing countries. That's why hasan, Helsinki created Girls Can. It's fundraising done friend-to-friend, instead of stranger-to-stranger.
When a person starts a donation can through the Girls Can website, they pay a sum they want to get the can going. The payment is handled via credit cards or online banking. After donating, they then choose a friend from their Facebook friend list and the can is passed on to them. That friend can pick the can up, put in their donation, and then pass the can on, and so on. By making the donation collection function like a physical object that can only be held by one person at a time, people feel more engaged.Each can has a timeline where people can see who has donated, where, and how much. Each can also has a map showing the amount of money gathered, as well as stats on the can in in comparison to all of the cans that have been created. The campaign was originally meant just for the Finnish market, but by using Facebook, it has become global.Instead of blaming people for not participating in fundraising, we made it something they want to be engaged in. This campaign was designed to require as little effort as possible, to keep the participation threshold low.Girls Can was kicked off in August 2012 and will run until 2015. The campaign is run on a very low budget and has been supported with a very minimal amount of paid advertising. Most of the traffic to the site is organic. The Girls Can campaign has already gotten plenty of PR and several celebrities have joined the campaign and started their own cans. The cans have traveled over a million kilometers, 25 times around the world. The campaign has so far collected over USD$37,000, which is a significant achievement in a market of five million people. We put the fun back in fundraising.