Inspired By A Single Tweet - HoHoTo Redux
Monday night I attended an event built by a community for a community to support our community - #hohoto
You may have heard of it. If you are in Toronto, you were probably there too. The place was packed.
Inspired by a single tweet from @austinhill, #hohoto started as a great idea for Toronto's tech community to have a get together and raise a little money for charity. Then it turned into something epic. (And if you think I might be using that word a little loosely, we have someone using #hohoto as part of her PhD research.)
In 2 short weeks, our community has raised $25,000 for Daily Bread Food Bank, becoming one of this year's top 5 third-party fundraisers. We sold out the Mod Club and built a black market for #hohoto tickets on twitter. We generated over 100 pages of tweets (twitter only lets you see 100 pages in search). Right before we lost count, we calculated #hohoto had raised approximately $15 per tweet.
Leaders in the tech industry & social media community who weren't in Toronto sent in video shout outs to the crowd praising them for making a difference, and even Toronto's Mayor David Miller got his challenge in - for #hohoto to raise $25,000 by the end of the evening. (Which with a little top of from Molson the next morning was met!) #hohoto garnering mainstream media attention. We even got the army's help in collecting all the food donations at the event.
#hohoto was the #1 tweet-trend on-and-off for almost 24 hours and the entire event was organized by a group of people who are only loosely associated through social media tools. Or at least we were, now we've actually met each other. (Disclosure: I am one of those people)
On top of all that... The party rocked!
Based on comments at the event, the Twitter back channel and the nature of the community I expect there will be some analysis, backlash and criticisms.
However, all hiccups, missteps and mismatched prizes aside, we as a community came together to do good and at $25,000 for Daily Bread we did some serious good
Congratulations to every single person who was involved, tweeted about it, came, bought a raffle ticket, donated at the p#hohotobooth and helped make Toronto a little less hungry!
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