Help me help you know what I'm doing.

May 20, 2009 8:03 AM

I'm walking to raise funds for an institution that provides health care to children and I want to set up an online page or site to let donors know of my progress live on the day of the event. How can I do that as painlessly as possible?

What I'd like to do is to have a central online location where the donors who sponsored me can go to and view (among other things) information like my current location, live tweeting info as I'm on the walk, or live updates on the trail (it's a 7-mile walk), maybe mobile photos of the event as seen through my eyes before, during and after the event. It would be cool to have the ability to let donors or other people contribute (comments etc...) to the website/page.

This will also serve the purpose of eliminating a mass of emails for me to send out for updates.

What I'm ultimately looking for here is to enable people to participate or be involved or to know what is going on, how their contribution is being "earned". It's one thing to donate some money to a charity and get a thank you card in the mail weeks later, it's another thing to be able to know and see the event you're sponsoring. It'll hopefully allow people/donors to better connect with the abstract of "requesting a donation, donating to this cause" thing.

I tried to figure out a way to do it on Facebook but creating a group for the event requires inviting people and then hoping that they join the group. Not every donor is on Facebook but they all can go online to a website for example.

Any thoughts, ideas, suggestions?

Thanks in advance.

posted by eatcake to human relations (6 comments total)

The easiest solution I could think of, aside from building your own site, would be to use twitter and twitpic. Also, encourage other walkers to use a common #tag, and mention that tag in your bio.

You can update to twitpic and flikr at the same time. Flickr would allow people to post comments using yahooID or openID. For twitter you'd need to be a member.

A more involved option would be creating a site, possibly in wordpress, that would have a flickr and twitter module. It would read and feed the content to your homepage. I don't have much experience with wordpress, so I'll let others speak for it.
posted by fontophilic at 8:21 AM on May 20

I came in here to also recommend the use of Twitter. You can use widgets from your Twitter feed and post them on other sites as well if you wanted to create a whole page for this or direct people to an existing one but still have the updates come in.

People don't need to be members in order to read updates on Twitter or see image uploads to Twitpic, only to comment. So even if they aren't members, they can still see everything.
posted by cmgonzalez at 9:14 AM on May 20

MapMyRun has training logs. I'm not sure if they're viewable by non-members, though. If so (and maybe even if not) this is the exact functionality that you seem to describe, plus they can do things like look at your route.
posted by cmoj at 11:31 AM on May 20

Before you reinvent the wheel, have you checked whether the institution already provides such a site? I have had several friends do runs/walks/polar-bear-dives for various health charities and they've been given all sorts of tools to make it easy. One that springs to mind is Caring Bridge.
posted by bcwinters at 2:12 PM on May 20

I like the Twitter idea but I'd like it to be more than that. The institution does have members' pages but it only allows for a few paragraphs from the walker (me) and will only list donors' names, amount contributed, and a short message from them.

I'm wondering now if it isn't just simpler, like bcwinters mentions, to put up a quick page/site/blog on wordpress.com or something similar rather than trying to make it too complicated. I was hoping there would be simpler solution but maybe not.
posted by eatcake at 4:16 PM on May 20

Wayfaring is a website that lets you send updates on where you are to a webpage with a map, so little markers appear on the map as you go along. You can email a link to people, who can leave comments on it as well, I think it also accepts photos or notes.
posted by harriet vane at 2:40 AM on May 21