How You Can Help #Blogladesh

*Updated 18.08.10*

You guys? Are brilliant. It’s official. Lots and lots and LOTS of you are asking you can help us with our Blogladesh campaign so this is just a quick post to let you know a few things you can do NOW and to answer a few questions that a lot of you are asking:

Petition

We want to collect over 100,000 signatures putting pressure on Nick Clegg to make child mortality and maternal health a priority at the UN Summit in September. The Press for Change Ap on the Save the Children Facebook page will take just two minutes of your time but collectively could make a HUGE difference. Come and add your name here.

Donate

All of this is to raise awareness about the amazing work that Save the Children are doing every single day and the huge difference your backing can make. Monetary donations are essential to help Save the Children keep doing what you’re doing and  link to their donations page can be found here on our news page.

A few of you asked about donating things for us to take out with us when we go. The practicalities of this a huge so if you would like to donate goods then our suggestion is taking them to your local Save the Children shop – you can find your local one at the bottom of the page here. One bag of donated clothes is the equivalent to £30 so it really does make a difference

Power of Twitter (you strange people that don’t use Twitter can ignore this bit)

The ability to use Twitter to get our message out quickly to a large number of people is not to be underestimated.

As well as obviously re-tweeting our blog posts, news and messages and telling your followers about our campaign, using the #blogladesh hashtag on as many as your tweets about as our campaign as possible and, more importantly, encouraging your followers to do the same, will soon get people noticing and wondering what we’re talking about. Hell, we could even get it trending. We did on Sunday!

We now have a daily broadcast that you can subscribe to giving you news on all the #blogladesh tweets and buzz to help you keep up to date.

If we can get celeb power behind us all the better. Thanks to some sterling work from some very dedicated tweeters, the effort to get some well-known figures to pass on our message to their followers is going strong. Last night @nakedjen managed to get a re-tweet from my very favourite author in all the world, Neil Gaiman. Neil has one and a half MILLION followers – that’s how many people potentially viewed his tweet last night, and (updated) the lovely Stephen Fry tweeted a link today too. That’s a lot of people clicking through and reading about our campaign.

So if you follow any celebrities or well-known figures, or even just any big brands and organisations on twitter then consider tweeting them and asking to support our cause by sending their followers the link to our news page. Keep it simple and don’t harass them – no need to flood your or their time line. Everyone tweeting their fave celeb once or twice over time will have a bigger impact than a mass bombardment of tweets: here’s an example tweet for you to copy and paste if you like or you can get a bit more creative…

(insert your @celeb of choice) Please please RT to support three mummy bloggers off to Bangladesh with Save The Children http://tinyurl.com/2vnjebm #Blogladesh

We also now have  Twibbon for you to add to your twitter avatars – click here to get yours!.

Facebook

It’s easy to share our blog posts on Facebook and get your family and friends involved. We will also have a Facebook page up and running shortly which we will announce as soon as its ready. As soon as we do then like, like, like and suggest all of your friends do the same.

Blogging

We would love it if you could write a blog post to tell your readers what we’re doing. Add our badge to your blog by getting the code here and don’t forget to add the URL of your post to Sian’s McLinky here.

Organisations and Businesses

If you run a website or an organisation or online business and have some web space to spare, it would mean the world to us to feature our campaign on your website. Even just adding our badge to your site will encourage people to click through and find out what we’re talking about.

Press and PR

If your represent press or PR a full press release for our campaign can be found here. If you yourself have press contacts that you can utilize then please, please consider letting them know what we are doing, sending them the press release or putting them in touch with us directly.

Above all THANK YOU to all of you that have been doing all of the above already and making this campaign already such as HUGE success. It’s people power that is going to make this work and you are already proving to be a powerful, dedicated force.

**UPDATE** This campaign relies on your support. If you have any questions or suggestions we would love to hear from you directly. At the end of the day ALL OF THIS is about making noise and getting people talking about Save the Children’s work and child mortality. And I think we can all agree that is a very good thing indeed.

Image Credit: Brad Ruggles

Keep up to date with all the Blogladesh developments by following my blog’s RSS feed and by following me on Twitter. Don’t forget to read my team-mates blogs too – Sian at Mummy Tips (@mummytips), Eva at NixdMinx (@nixdminx) and Liz from Save the Children (@lizscarff and @SaveChildrenPR)

If you represent Press or PR and would like more information about or trip or to find out ways you can get involved, please contact me here.

You might also like: