I'm not on facebook, but from what I've seen there doesn't seem to be an easy way to broadcast your donation. I wonder if people would be more inclined to donate if it also broadcasted "columbo gave $2" over "columbo likes this".<p>If it sorted the highest donations to the top it'd even encourage large companies to donate for the free advertising - "Nissan gave $2,500"
Maybe there should be a "Like+" button or something. You can fund your facebook account and every time you "Like+" an image the person or entity who posted the image receives a dollar which is deducted from your account. Maybe only certain types of accounts, like UNICEF, should be eligible to receive funds.
Bitcoin could play a key role here. In my experience, donating using bitcoin feels clicking a "like" button. After learning about the system and how to use the client, its as easy as logging into facebook to like something.
It's very disappointing to see such a smart community bicker about a topic they clearly know little about and have done even less research to back up their comments. Let's cut the crap about Bitcoin, building esoteric Facebook apps to broadcast message, and A/B testing funding effectiveness to prove a point.<p>An article from Humanosphere (full disclosure, I work with this organization) <a href="http://www.humanosphere.org/2013/04/unicef-sweden-wants-your-money-not-your-likes/" rel="nofollow">http://www.humanosphere.org/2013/04/unicef-sweden-wants-your...</a> actually digs a little deeper into the topic. Regardless of what you think of The Atlantic's article, the UNICEF campaign is fully integrated with press ads, tv spots, radio commercials, digital material, and PR. An integrated campaign on this scale is (unfortunately) relatively unheard of in the development community due to funding issues and uproar whenever any non-profit's seen to be spending excessively on initiatives that don't directly go to the task at hand.<p>I personally think the campaign is effective; UNICEF is going against the grain by calling out the shortcomings of social media when most other non-profits (I've had experience working with a couple) are all using likes, retweets, and pins as KPIs (but clearly don't have a perfect correlation with the bottom line)
Fully on bored with UNICEF, but this article is poorly written.<p>First of all, the entire article says nothing I didn't get out of the headline but it used a lot words to say it. And, the paragraph that quotes Zeynep Tufekci seems to misunderstand, or the very least mis-apply Tufecki's statement. After all, it never took a full-on <i>activists</i> to donate four euro to UNICEF.
I'm working on an idea to tackle/nudge slacktivists into become really active ... or at least make visible to them how volatile and in the end meaningless their +1, Likes and Favs really are when true/real world/operative support would be due.
If you are interested please stop by at www.sustinion.com as I'm looking for "external" feedback to validate the ideas.
All in all, bad darts from Unicef as 'likers' donate as well. Basically they say we don't want likes, just money please.<p>The solution is simple. The platform (in this case Facebook) has enough money to step up and give 0.01$/0.1$/1$ for each like of the photo/page.<p>I am pretty sure it wouldn't be a significant dent for Facebook's finances, actually with proper campaign it could go in their favour via stocks.<p>But then again, Unicef isn't the only charity in the world and supporting one and ignoring the others isn't fair as well.
Point is well taken, UNICEF. But are the people who Like the pages the same people who are likely to donate? I suspect that many of the people who Like the sites are either unable to donate or are too young to donate. So the Likes are a good idea because they encourage involvement and influence future behaviour when such people are able to do more. Might not help in the short term, but it will likely have great benefits in the future.
Seems like they want it both ways. They put share and like and follow buttons all over their site, but then they say it's meaningless.<p>"Likes" seem very similar to ads and mailers. They generate donations. At least Likes don't cost Unicef anything... that mailer they send me stops some kid from getting a polio vaccination.
I take offense at this. My facebook activity has yielded <i>hundreds</i> of grains of rice for starving children! I also stopped Joseph Kony and brought about marriage equality.