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The results from this year’s Twestival Global are still trickling in, but founder Amanda Rose let us know that the effort has raised more than $450,000 for Concern Worldwide, an international NGO helping fund educational projects around the world.

Compared to last year’s total of $250,000, contributions to Twestival Global 2010 grew by more than 80% during its second annual fundraising event. Combined with donations throughout the year, Rose said a whopping $1.2 million has been raised over the past 14 months on behalf of 137 organizations. Judy Chang of PayPal’s nonprofit team told us about $288,000 of this year’s funds came through her organization. The global sponsor of Twestival helped accept a truly worldwide outpouring of support from 45 countries in 12 different currencies.

How Technology Impacts Fundraising Campaigns

Both Rose and Chang spoke highly of technology’s role in enabling cause campaigns like Twestival. Rose said technology offers “a way for us to work efficiently, openly and encourage ownership of fundraising activities by allocating widgets which people can share and promote on other social media sites. You cannot fundraise on Twitter alone; you need a strong infrastructure behind the scenes which people trust in order to secure donations.”

The new Twestival Results feature, as well as the citywide donation widgets with leaderboards, were both credited with driving increased giving this year. Rose said the real-time nature of the fundraising thermometers and the transparency afforded by the new tools were instrumental to the growth of this year’s efforts. “It’s important to put real-time technology into perspective with real world results for the cause. The most powerful thing we did was add an Impact tab which measured all of our fundraising data against Concern’s average educational project costs,” she explained.

Mobile Giving Will Continue to Be an Important Force

Chang cites mobile fundraising platforms as one of the most exciting developments for cause campaigns in the foreseeable future. “We’ve seen so much interest from mobile application developers who want to promote social good,” she claimed. “More and more people are coming to us either with an app they’ve already built or saying, ‘We want to build an app for charitable giving.’” Embedding donation engines into mobile apps complements the power and simplicity of SMS donations that were so instrumental to the Haiti earthquake fundraising campaign.

Here too the real-time nature afforded by technology and mobility has been making a big impact on social good campaigns like Twestival. Rose said, “the fact that cities could see a leaderboard and fundraising thermometer online or via their iPhone in real-time is extremely motivating for people to give. At physical events many cities set up computers for people to continue to donate and some even found it a simple way to collect immediate payments for auction winnings.”

Twestival 2010: A Resounding Success

Beyond the increased financial success of Twestival this year, the awareness created around global educational needs and the work of organizations to address them was important to Rose as the event’s founder.

“The most gratifying thing is to see how transformational the Twestival experience can be for an organization like Concern Worldwide,” Rose said. “Here is an organization that has been doing phenomenal work for over 40 years in some of the poorest parts of the world and through social media and our global reach we are able to inject an enthusiasm.”

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Tags: Amanda Rose, charity, concern worldwide, education, fundraising, Judy Chang, Mobile 2.0, nonprofit, paypal, real-time, social good, twestival