I read this article on Mashable this morning and it made me stop and think. Many organisations have a Corporate Social Responsibility programme often referred to as CSR. It generally centres around the CSR team selecting a preferred charity or local Non Profit Organisation (NPO) and either making a cash donation or through supporting the employees by donating time to help out with the charity or NPO.
Now I love the thought of crowd sourcing solutions to peoples problems, but I have to admit my first reaction to seeing this news item was that it is going to be full of duplicitous people looking to freeload of generous individuals who are looking to genuinely relieve some suffering out there. To some degree I was right. Judging by the requests for money from some people you could assume they were freeloading. However, on closer inspection you notice that the stories all have a pattern. The individuals in question all seem to have had a tragedy within their lives making them down on their luck or causing them to develop a mental illness.
This alone makes you realize that you are in a unique position to help others less fortunate than yourself. By providing a small amount of charitable time/money/advice you can help move these people out of their current situation and maybe, just maybe, move them onto a stable path rather than a downward spiral. The fact that Wish Upon a Hero is using a Social Media paradigm to attract and enable donations confirms that Crowd Sourcing can provide actions in a wider social context. All of those people out there who do not understand the power of Twitter, Facebook, Quora and so on, take a look at Wish Upon a Hero and see how you can get involved with Social Media and try and project how you could build upon the concept held within this site and apply it to future uses of Social Media then you will begin to understand the power of this technology.
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