User:Tyohann/sandbox

Social Media Giving Day
Social Media Giving Day is an online holiday created by St. Louis-based technology and social philanthropy organization Givver.com. Givver.com was beta tested with the Obama for America campaign in 2012. Givver spent 5 months working with elected officials around the country, charitable organizations and social media influencers to promote the day as a way to use social media for social good and to leverage social media as a means to #give to their favorite charity or cause. Governors and Mayors around America declared July 15th "Social Media Giving Day". The online holiday was trail-blazed by founder of Givver, Chris Sommers. The inaugural celebration of Social Media Giving Day occurred on July 15, 2013. This day was marked as the first social media giving day in the U.S., July 15th, is also the anniversary date of the public launch of Twitter in 2006.

Mayoral and Gubernatorial Declarations
Mayoral and gubernatorial declarations establishing July 15 as Social Media Giving Day have been made by Governor Jay Nixon (Missouri), Mayor John Sorey (Naples, FL), Mayor Buddy Dyer (Orlando, FL), Mayor Nancy McFarlane (Raleigh, NC), Mayor Mark Mallory (Cincinnati, OH), Mayor Tom Barrett (politician) (Milwaukee, WI), Mayor Jacques Roy (mayor) (Alexandria, LA), Mayor Sam Kooiker (Rapid City, SD), Mayor Francis Slay (St. Louis, MO), Mayor Dan Snarr (Murray, UT) and the entire City Council in Pittsburgh, PA. Social Media Giving Day has therefore not been fully recognized nationally yet.

Media Coverage
The inaugural Social Media Giving Day was covered in Forbes, Techli, the St. Louis Business Journal, Social Media Explorer, Fox 2 St. Louis and various other national and local news outlets.

Philanthropic Impact
According to data obtained in 2013, 47 percent of Americans learn about causes through social media. On July 15, 2013, Givver saw a thirty-percent increase in the number of donors alone. Social Media Giving Day, therefore, serves as an opportunity for various political campaigns, non-profit organizations and charity organizations to appeal to social media's users to donate towards their causes. These causes include animals, children, health and wellness, human rights and disaster relief/ poverty and hunger. The non-profits that benefited from this holiday have increased ten-fold. This was done through various social media giving tools such as Giver.com, Fundly.com, Snowball.com, SocialFund.org and GoFundMe.com.

Ethical Issues
Many experts have warned that scams could take place during the holiday that can ultimately jeopardize the user's account on Twitter. Such scams could be used to steal private information from the user through different claims for a "beneficial cause", such as profile passwords, credit card accounts, etc.

Related Holidays


 * 1) Giving Tuesday, which is celebrated on the Tuesday after Thanksgiving, also celebrates a day of charitable giving through social media, and attempts to promote online giving during the Christmas holiday season . Its partners include the CECP, the Giving Institute, Giving USA Foundation, Dorothy A. Johnson Center on Philanthropy, and the Huffington Post.