In May Phil Burn’s daughter, Serenity, was diagnosed with leukemia . Phil Burns is a local entrepreneur, blogger, and technologist and well known in the local technology scene. With the announcement of the news, fellow bloggers immediately responded by distributing the Chip In Widget (created by Jesse Stay) amongst their online presence and pitching in donations. Jesse had initially set the targeted donation goal at $500 to hopefully be achieved within the one month period. The $500 goal was quickly exceeded, resulting in Jesse bumping the goal to $1,000. Yet, the donations kept rolling in and by the time the month had passed, $10,600 was raised through the simple addition of a couple lines of code on a number of blogs. (I swapped emails with Jesse in hopes of understanding the exact distribution of the widget, but unfortunately the widget creation site used does not provide the statistics. Bummer.)

This simple campaign made me ponder how a good sum of money could be raised over such a short period of time and if it was a model that could be used in the non-profit realm. Looking back on the Chip In Widget, it seemed to be have such an impact for four main reasons.

1. It Hit A Pain Point – many of us probably know someone who has been diagnosed with cancer. But the pain point in Serenity’s case is that she is young, being diagnosed at the age of 22 months. An age that shouldn’t have to endure pain or a terrible disease.
2. It was Personal – often with non-profits you see a picture of a child or a family but you don’t personally know that family. I don’t know the exact distribution of the widget, but it seemed that many of us personally knew Phil.
3. It was Targeted – The widget was distributed through the technology community with which Phil is a member.
4. There was a Deadline – It is human nature (or at least in my case) to procrastinate. The creation of a deadline made people respond.

Would this be able to work in a non-profit scenario if they had an online presence and following? Seems like the targeted and deadline points could easily be achieved, but hitting a main pain point and making It personal are the tricky aspects. What do you readers think?