I am thrilled to announce that a gift of one heifer has been purchased through the generosity of GrayMatter Minute’s social media community.

Thank you all so very much for supporting our holiday heifer campaign for Heifer International.

We raised $415 toward our $500 goal.

I feel VERY confident that we would have actually hit the $500 mark this past Friday had it not been for a “user error” committed by yours truly when setting up the “end time” on my ChipIn fundraising widget. (I accidentally set it to end at 12 noon instead of 12 midnight. Woops.)

Live, learn, mooooove on, right?

I look forward to sharing what I learned about social fundraising with you in a forthcoming post. Until then, congratulations and thank you for your kindness in passing on the gift.

Click here to view my official Heifer Thank You card to all of you who supported this effort — from donations to retweets to facebook posts and emails. I know you’ll miss my #heifer-inspired “Cow Tips” and action-packed cow videos as much as I will.

Friday, December 18th is the last day of our “holiday heifer” campaign for Heifer International. Your last chance to own a $5 share of our very social cow. This cow will go to a community in need and provide a gift that keeps on mooing for years to come. If you haven’t pitched in, please consider our request for help: just $5 toward our $500 goal. We even made a quick little moovie (get it?) to inspire you…

If it doesn’t appear above, you can view the video on YouTube: Holiday Heifer.

Thanks to everyone who has contributed to our community cow thus far. This has been a wonderful opportunity to experience the generosity of friends — and strangers!

I’ll write a post-holiday heifer recap of the campaign as a mini-social fundraising case study. I learned a lot about social fundraising tactics and tools (and cows, for that matter) and have a lot of ideas about what I might have done differently which I hope will be of value to both individuals and nonprofits.

Thanks again. And we wish you very happy holidays.

Why a Heifer?

Here’s information direct from Heifer International:

Heifer
Heifers Equal Hope

When a family has a cow, every morning there’s a glass of rich milk for the children to drink before heading off to school. Classes are paid with the income from the sale of milk, and there’s even enough to share with the neighbors.

A good dairy cow can produce four gallons of milk a day – enough for a family to drink and share with neighbors. Milk protein transforms sick, malnourished children into healthy boys and girls. The sale of surplus milk earns money for school fees, medicine, clothing and home improvements.

Better still, every gift multiplies, as the animal’s first offspring is passed on to another family-then they also agree to pass on an animal, and so on.

And because a healthy cow can produce a calf every year, every gift will be passed on and eventually help an entire community move from poverty to self reliance. Now that’s a gift worth giving!

I’m reaching out to you this holiday season with a humble request.

Please help me gift a cow to a community in need by donating $5.

You may already be familiar with the work of Heifer International — I have in the past gifted smaller mammals (chickens, rabbits, etc), but was inspired at this year’s TEDxMidAtlantic to aim higher and reach for the cow.

Here’s my outreach goal:

100 People + $5 Each = 1 Happy Cow

This is GrayMatter Minute’s very first social media-based fundraising effort. So, please, help a sister out. The faster we hit the $500 cow-mark, the bigger the hurrah for the power of social media.

Why Heifer International?

Because I like their philosophy of sustainable support. That is, Heifer programs foster self-reliance through livestock and training until entire communities are transformed. They are very busy working to end hunger and poverty while caring for the Earth at the same time. This, to me, seems like a jolly good idea all around. Even for the cow. You can find out more at the official Heifer International web site.

What does this have to do with social media?

Well, on the social tools front I’m using ChipIn to coordinate contributions. If you cannot see the nifty ChipIn donation box above, it is viewable on the GrayMatter Minute blog sidebar or on ChipIn’s handy custom web page.

To help spread the word, I invite you to add a little cow to your profile pic on Twitter or Facebook through Twibbon if you really want to rally for this cause or if you just really like cows.

So there you have it. Thanks to those who have already dropped their fivers in the bucket.

Hope you, too, willl be mooved to help.

Been waiting for the post where I summarize my experience at TEDx MidAtlantic? The wait is over. You’ll be most impressed, I hope, with how uncharacteristically brief I am in my recap.

TEDx was an inspirational “conference – concert – workshop – performance – therapy.”

That’s it. That’s my recap.

It was simply great to be in a room with so much positive energy floating around in it. I’ll leave the lengthier, more in-depth TEDx reviews to others. If that’s all you’d like to know about TEDx, that’s my very best summation. If you want to see what you missed, click here to view the TEDx MidAtlantic videos. Now I’d like to seamlessly segue into a question:

What inspires you?

After listening to the speakers cover a vast array of topics at TEDx, I felt as though there was absolutely something there for everyone to walk away with…the odds were highly in your favor that someone there said something inspirational at some point in the day with enough gusto to inspire you for weeks to come, so no one had to leave empty-headed…er, handed.

What inspired me?

Simply put, bones and eggs inspired me to get a cow.

My TEDx takeaway turned out to be a fusion of two ideas from two different speakers.

1. Naomi Natale, a TED Fellow, is the founder of a new project titled “One Million Bones.” To me, what was most striking about Ms. Natale’s TEDx talk was that she saw a problem and did something about it. What she’s doing is amazing, and you can read about it here and follow the project on Facebook and Twitter. The connection she created in my mind was instant. She reminded me of how I felt after I read The Translator by Daoud Hari this past summer (I even wrote about its impact on me in a blog post). After reading the book, I felt impotent because I now have all of Hari’s stories in my head (TEDx MidAtlantic was about “The Power of Stories”) and I didn’t see where in my world I would be able to do anything about it. Naomi, however, has found ways to do something about the problems she sees or hears about.  I’m pretty sure that’s what TED — and life — is all about. Doing.
2. Joel Salatin is an organic farmer. Many will remember Mr. Salatin’s TEDx talk for how he described how he helped his chickens achieve their complete “chicken-ness” which then turned into a highly successful agri-business. As it turns out, I raise backyard chickens — Polish crested hens. (Didn’t know that about me, did you?) So I thoroughly enjoyed and understood what he meant when he described the “essence of an egg.” But what I will remember most from his talk is one very simple thing he said that should be on a bumper sticker or T-shirt or something, “If it’s gonna be, it’s up to me.” I like that. It’s a personal call to action and I dig it.

Voila! Together, those ideas gave shape to my TEDx takeaway.

You may not think you can change the world, but I think what matters is that you think you can change your world. Your day to day. Your life experience.

I’m on it. You see, it occurred to me that there are a lot of people who speak at all of the TED events who are busy about changing the world. And thank goodness for them! But that is a tall order: change the world. I mean some days I’m lucky to remember to change the sheets, let alone the world. Now as a rule, I generally like to set “achievable goals” for myself. So here’s what I’m doing with all that TEDx inspiration I soaked up.

I want to buy a cow.

More precisely, I want to facilitate the purchase of a heifer through Heifer International leveraging the power of social media and the inspiration I drew from TEDx MidAtlantic.

I’ll post about this in more detail in a few days as I suspect few people have read this far down into my thought-thread. But here’s the general idea:

100 People, $5 Each, 1 Happy Cow

I plan to use Twitter and Twibbon.com, my blogs, ChipIn and Facebook to spread the word and mooooove (sorry) my little social network community toward a collaborative gift for another little community in the world.

So, thanks Naomi. Thanks Joel. Thanks TEDx MidAtlantic speakers all.

Inspiration is a happy little thing — regardless of whether you’re giving or receiving.

And it need not begin — or end — with a cow. There are people you meet and stories you hear every day that can serve as inspiration — to influence your ideas about your job or your personal life or a goal that you might finally see a path to achieve. Might be a big thing, or it might be a tiny, itty-bitty step in a different direction. What inspires you and what you do with all that inspiration is uniquely yours. With all of the new ways we have of connecting with people these days, it seems one could never run out of inspirational resources.

I say, we milk them for all they’re worth.

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