As many of you may have heard, on April 14 via his official Twitter account, Hugh Jackman announced, “I will donate 100K to one individual’s favorite non profit organization. Of course, you must convince me why by using 140 characters or less.”
As soon as I saw this, I took the opportunity to use my Twitter account for good and sent a plea to Mr. Jackman to donate the money to a charity close to my heart, charity:water. Because the organization is run by several young tech-savvy New Yorkers, led by Scott Harrison, charity:water acted quickly to get the above photo on Twitpic and sent to Hugh. After sending Hugh all the messages we could, we all just kept our fingers crossed…
After thousands of entries, on April 24 Hugh called Ryan Seacrest’s radio show (click here to hear the clip from his show) and announced that he couldn’t choose just one charity, therefore he decided to split the $100k between two charities, charity:water and Operation of Hope.
This amazing story created quite a frenzy on Twitter of people celebrating and thanking Hugh. Immediately the group at charity:water took a photo of themselves celebrating to thank Hugh. Scott also spoke to the director at Operation of Hope to help them set up a Twitter account for the organization. They immediately started thanking Hugh as well.
Come back for updates on how charity:water is putting the funds from Hugh Jackman to use; much like they did after the Twestival events, the organization announced that they “will show you every well you helped build.”
We previously had a discussion on this blog about the utility of Twitter, but clearly this is another example (in addition to Twestival) of how Twitter can be utilized for great causes. Does anyone else know examples of how people have utilized Twitter for good? Or know of any organizations supporting animal rights or vegan clothing?