When the digital universe announced that all your favorite celebrities would be dead on all social media channels on Dec 1^st until their loyal followers donated 1 million dollars, I was left scratching my head. But I was intrigued and thought that ‘social media fundraising’ is still very new, but that maybe this could work – but it is a long shot.

Then I went to the comments section of the article. In the news source I was using, there had to be 50 comments on the article saying things like “whatever shuts them up”, “I hope they never come back” and “If Kanye is included I will never donate”. It was then I knew this campaign was doomed.

I could see the offer was weak, to think that I or anyone else would actually love or miss the constant communication from a particular celebrity so much that I would give my money to get them back as fast as I could was pretty ridiculous.

6 days in the campaign was dead, stuttering around $200,000. The minimum donation was dropped from $10 to $5, and less interest being drawn across all media outlets (except in late-night monologues). So they just filled the fundraising tank in about 8 hours and finished things off. Yeah, everyone was digitally alive again! I can sleep! Who, if anyone, donated after that first week, we don’t know. We may never know but I suspect they just decided to end it.

This did little to help allay the fear of taking risks around fundraising in the social media space. Every charity watched this campaign, the effort behind it and how it sputtered and failed to reach its goal. “If Alicia Keys, Justin Timberlake etc. cannot make social media work for fundraising, how can I?” All the interesting risks charities could be taking will be rethought and evaluated against this. That sucks and I hope charities consider take away number 2 which is…

This campaign was not well thought out at all, and I believe smart charities could come up with a better campaign in which they spend less and make more. The offer was terrible, and overall, just vain. We as a public could quickly dissect this campaign to its core, “heaven forbid you live without my tweets”. Imagine the power to move people this group of celebrities have, and perhaps if they came out and said they would match a $500,000 fundraising campaign dollar for dollar and turn it into a million dollar campaign they would have looked like saints (or at least better than they do now). That would mean for the 19 celebrity participants, they would each need to donate $26,316 dollars. Is that is a lot of money to them? It is 0.053% of the net worth of Usher and 0.044% of the net worth of Lady Gaga. Usher bought Justin Bieber a freaking $75,000 Range Rover for this birthday!

So charities, don’t get discouraged, keep taking calculated risks and use this ‘Digital Dead’ campaign as a sign of what not to do.

Off to find out which boat Kim Kardashian is on right now.