No, this is not an unsavoury campaign in any way. It is, however, a very noble and innovative campaign aiming at raising money for Breast Cancer Research. Tweet for Boobs is a US-based initiative in which Twitter users can use the tag #tweetforboobs and even mention @tweetforboobs in their status updates.

For a good summary, here’s the blurb from the website …

Help raise $10 000 for breast cancer research.
All you have to do is include #tweetsforboobs in a tweet through the month of October and with every tweet you are making a $1 pledge for donation.

Follow @tweetsforboobs and at the end of the month, we’ll give you your pledge total so you can make a donation to Susan G Komen Foundation for your total pledge amount.

An initiative like this got me thinking in terms of charities and other non-profit and non-governmental organisations in South Africa and how they can use such widely available platforms to raise money for very good causes. Gone are the days of rich benefactors supporting small IT start-ups which can manage an on-line campaign. Anyone with a computer and modem these days can launch an entire on-line campaign and manage it single-handedly.

So where are the South Africans who need money … I think the least we can do, if not contribute, is try and get South African charities (especially the breast cancer research organisations) to get involved in some way with this initiative.

Why not launch a South African chapter of @tweetforboobs. Something like @SAtweetforboobs.

Since we are all online, we should get involved in one way or another.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, October 8th, 2009 at 3:23 pm and is filed under Web 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.