Going Digital Counts: Two Supermoms Share their Stories at Mashable Social Good Summit

The Mashable Social Good Summit kicked off today with an impressive lineup of speakers. Fundly folks were happy to be in New York among some of today’s leading social and digital pioneers at the annual event that was streamed live to more than 1,000 plugged-in participants. The message of the day was clear: digital innovations are connecting people and doing good around the world.



In one afternoon session supermodel-turned-maternal health advocate Christy Turlington Burns discussed her work with Every Mother Counts, a non-profit she founded in 2010 to advocate for maternal health. Turlington Burns, whose 2010 film No Woman, No Cry documents the journeys of mothers around the globe joined renowned “mommyblogger” Heather Armstrong in conversation about two things that unite us all: stories and women.

The session, moderated by UN President and CEO Kathy Calvin, began in Turlington Burns’ own delivery room with the opening sequence from No Woman, No Cry.  In the clip, Turlington Burns narrates that the day her 8-year-old daughter Grace was born one “one of the best days” of her life “and also the scariest” as she remembers the alarming complications she experienced after giving birth. She goes on to state a disturbing truth: every minute a woman dies from a pregnancy-related and most of these deaths are preventable.

Turlington Burns’ film and message are certainly moving. They’re moving, largely, because they are intimate and personal. Both women are master storytellers who seem to realize the power of the human story. They’re also women who realize the power of sharing stories and have used social media, largely through Armstrong’s blog Dooce, to help make a personal concern a universal cause. The statistics seem to suggest that they have been hugely successful; over the past 10 years, maternal mortality in Bangladesh has dropped 40 percent.

Every Mother Counts is doing good work.

“Our voices can make a bigger impact together than on our own,” Turlington Burns said.
Armstrong added that using your voice means sharing your voice. The most effective advocacy work has gone digital. There are millions of untapped optimists, many of whom are women and stay-at-home mothers, just waiting to be tapped. They want to contribute to causes they care about. They want to share their voice. They want to give money.

Like Christy and Heather, Fundly believes in the power of the collective and the power of voice. We’ve built a social fundraising platform that honors both the social and the individual.

Doing good means making the person and the world a part of each other’s stories. It also means making the person and the world a part of each other’s priorities.

The Power of Social Donations – Turning Donors into Fundraisers

We just released a new video highlighting the Power of Social Donations – see video and transcript below:

Fundly is a Social Fundraising platform that has been proven to deliver higher fundraising participation, higher pledge fulfillment, higher referral rates and larger online gifts…meaning more money for your cause.

Fundly has already been used to raise over $200M dollars from hundreds of thousands of individual donors.

How does Fundly do this?

By turning every donation into a Social Donation.

Unlike a regular donation, a Social Donation captures the full-value of every donor or supporter.  Rather than simply letting a donor walk-away after donating, the Fundly platform uses every opportunity to turn that donor from just a giver into a gather.

Fundly helps insure that donors tell their friends who tell their friends, who tell their friends, who tell their friends, who tell their friends and so on.

By harnessing your supporter base to help you raise money, you can massively increase the effectiveness of your fundraising efforts.

The challenge is keeping your supporters engaged, on-track and accountable.  Without tools to do this, the process can feel a little like herding cats.

Fortunately, Fundly has been designed specifically to give you the tools you need to organize, motivate, direct, praise, reward and hold accountable your supporters, volunteers and board members to drive the fundraising outcomes your desire:

- Fundly’s Volunteer Fundraiser tools enable you to direct and hold accountable a team of volunteer fundraisers scaling anywhere from a small team of board members to national call events involving thousands of participants across multiple locations.

- Fundly’s Social Tools enable your supporters to help you raise money by engaging their existing social networks without ever having to leave Facebook.  Fundly’s Social Tools allow you to encourage supporters to compete with each other, work to earn rewards and give and receive virtual goods.

- Fundly’s Donation Management tools enable you to create customized donation pages for individual fundraisers, teams, groups and events.

- Underpinning the Fundly tools is a secure and reliable platform including simple, easy-to-use contact management, messaging tools, reporting and administration and a secure payment processing system that has already processed over $200M in donations.

Additional videos in the Take a Tour section of Fundly.com give more details on each of these elements.

Good luck with fundraising and never underestimate the power of the Social Donation.