Building an audience for the good of mankind
*MAKE SURE YOU READ TO THE BOTTOM FOR THE SPECIAL BONUS!**
**EDITED AND UPDATED AT THE BOTTOM 25 FEB 2017**
As I journey through this thing we call the internet, I am drawn deeper into the rabbit hole of how-to guides and best practices for SEO, branding, traffic generation, etc. I am not new to the internet. I have been working on and around it for almost 3 decades. Not until recently have I discovered the power that lies within these tools for something bigger than myself. A higher calling with an almost immediate feedback loop. This is the stuff that productivity is made of. Feeding the feedback loop and improving over a very short timeline. Almost like driving a racecar around a track at crazy speeds. Making a complete lap in a couple minutes, or even seconds. After every lap resetting the feedback loop in order to master one small hairline movement just to pick up 1/10th of a second on the following lap. This is a laser focus I have felt in the past. This is the adrenaline-like rush of having a profound purpose for what you want to accomplish. Getting at it very fast. Pushing it out to the masses. Seeing the results blow way past your expectations in a matter of hours or days at the most. This is what just happened to me in the last 14 days.The initial message came on January 9, 2017. A really good friend of mine asked about fundraising and if I had any experience with doing something stand alone in order to raise money for a family. Of course, my answer was, “I know about fund raising and I may have a few avenues of approach that could potentially be a good fit”. There was a Soldier who was injured badly and the idea was to raise some money in order to help with immediate family needs. He wasn’t injured in combat or anything like that. He was just doing what good dads do, playing on the trampoline with his kids in the backyard when he landed wrong and broke his neck. This accident sent him to the hospital for emergency care and the result was he would be paralyzed from the chest down. The first thing that popped into my mind was, holy shit, how could something like this happen to such a good soul… a stellar father, husband, and Soldier in the Army, MSG Elton. It made me re-think everything I had done and seen. It really grabbed my soul and shook it up. As I think it is probably doing to your soul this moment.
“Lets put together a gofundme page and push it out everywhere” — I tell Stacey do a write up and I help her get a video she created uploaded to the site. We go live and publish the site. Using some tricks I have learned I try to track it with everything I can as well as push it out all over social media. We do a simulcast live on Facebook and push the link for the fundraiser to the public. I post it all over my web page (find it here on my site) as well as Instagram and Twitter. The initial goal for the fundraiser was $5,000. I think we hit that in less than 24 hours. After pushing the link all day on all social media, doing an additional thank you on Facebook live, and sending it out through email distro channels we decided to let it ride and see where it would go. In less than 5 days we cranked out over $10,000 to the fund. The outpouring of love and gratitude have been overwhelming. So why not let it ride a little longer? How much more can we actually make for the family of MSG Elton? At the time of this writing (about 14 days into the fundraiser) we have amassed over $17,000. This might seem like a small number to some people but to me it is a very big deal. I have done fund raising before on my own and with organizations. I have raised a considerable amount of money over the years for different projects but I don’t think I have ever launched a 2 person fundraiser and collected over $17K dollars in less than 2 weeks, ever!
Which brings me to a really good point. Of course, this post is surley not about me, but I want to underline something here for the business-minded people who visit this site. The intersection of social media, online crowd-funding platforms, a little bit of SEO, and most importantly a really good cause for immediate help combined together to create a mega success (in my books anyway). This has been sort of a milestone, not only for the family of MSG Elton, but for myself in seeing something where I can harness my full heart and soul and help people out at the same time. It has taught me about the true meaning of teamwork. It has taught me about the complete enjoyment that comes from an exciting philanthropic project. Being excited again about something so important. Robert Kiyosaki once said something like, “a coin has three sides, heads, tails and the edge. If you look from the edge you can see both sides of the coin” or in my humble understanding, the answers of life are not on either side of the coin but on the edge of the coin where the two sides converge. The truth is where the pros and cons converge. The real innovation is where the technology, philosophy, chemistry, mecahnics all meet. The center of the Vin diagram if you will. I would just ask that you keep this in mind when trying to figure out your next business or fundraiser. Ask yourself “how can I bring all of these uniques ideas together in order to create something new”?
Now on to the icing on the cake and how you can continue to help if you so choose. Here are a couple of clips from the family on MSG Elton’s progress and their gratitude and thanks for all YOU have done to help out their family. The loving support and donations and good wishes for them. This is what makes it all worth while.
I apologize for the utterly HORRIBLE support of FB video on Medium. I spent a while trying to make it work but apparently I am not as smart as the machine today. If any of you have a suggestion on how to get the video loaded properly please let me know in the comments. Medium is a new medium for me. Still learning I suppose. You can also check out the post at my site linked below. Thank you for your patience and support!
Originally published at Business | Real Estate
