A Kiwiblog charity?

This is only an idea, so feedback welcome on it.

I’m a big believer in helping charities. Hell, I worked for the Red Cross for four years and it is amazing at how much can be done for sometimes not a lot of money. One or two staff can get water supplied to camps of thousands etc. Kiwis are great at giving up so much time and money to help others.

There are many great charities. SPCA, Women’s Refuge are a couple I always donate to. And all the cancer ones. Plus of course you get phoned all the time now asking for donations to other charities and you give a bit more often than not.

Anyway what I have been thinking is it would be great if the community that forms around a blog, can be used to support one particular charity in a really significant way.

Blogs sometimes get a negative rap for various things so I thought it would be great to also show another side.

So here is my idea:

1. See if people think the idea has merit
2. Try and get a small number of volunteers on board to help organise things
3. Ask people to nominate various charities for inclusion in a poll, to be Kiwiblog Charity for 2009. Probably have some criteria for shortlisting.
4. Have readers vote on preferred charity from the short list. We’ll rotate it every year, so missing out is not permanent.
5. Then over a year, undertake a range of activities for the charity, with some possibilities below:

• Kiwiblog donates 10% of advertising revenue to charity
• A free advertisement all year on Kiwiblog
• One or two dedicated fund-raisers a year on Kiwiblog, where we have perhaps a blog target of $x,000 to reach. Some sort of sidebar graphic that can show how much has been raised towards the target.
• A monthly post focusing on one of the charity’s projects.
• Possibly a couple of face to face events to raise money for the charity such as a celebrity debate or some quiz nights?
• Maybe even have Kiwiblog teams running in long distance races, with readers sponsoring people? Me completing a ten km run must be worth something 🙂

Let me know what you think of the idea. Would you take part if it was for a good charity? If we do it, how do we make it more fun?

Also if I do attempt to do this, I won’t have the time to organise everything myself. Would anyone out there want to be the unpaid charity organiser for Kiwiblog? Maybe something we can share amongst three or four of us – good to have a few to brainstorm ideas with.