Robi Ganguly’s Big Ideas

As most of you already know, Haiti was devastated by a 7.0 earthquake on Tuesday of this week. The damage assessments continue to roll in and the death tolls are still rising at this point, with the country’s limited infrastructure presenting massive obstacles in the relief effort. As I’ve been following the news on this earthquake, I’ve been struck by how my friends and others are using the Internet to voice their concern and to join in the call to take action. The sheer number of Tweets, blog posts and Facebook status updates imploring people to do something has been simply staggering (more on this here). It’s inspired me to try and play a small role in helping the people of Haiti (it’s estimated that up to 1/3 of the population is going to be in need of aid).

Before I get into the details, however, I want to highlight some things that you can do, yourself, to give to the relief effort:

• Text "Haiti" to 90999 in order to donate $10 to the Red Cross relief effort via your mobile phone bill
• Text "Haiti" to 20222 to donate $10 to the U.N. relief efforts via your mobile phone bill
• Donate through the Clinton Foundation’s dedicated page
• Donate through UNICEF
• Text "Yele" to 501501 to donate $5 to Wyclef Jean’s nonprofit organization

Now, in addition to sharing several ways that YOU can take action to help the people of Haiti, here’s what I’m going to do (and you can help me with it):

• I’m running a half marathon tomorrow, up in Bellingham, WA. It’s my first half marathon.
• My plan is to tweet every mile that I finish
• For every response or retweet that I get through Twitter, Facebook or on this blog, I’ll be making a donation through the U.N.
• My donation is going to be based on:  The # of responses/retweets X $.25 X the mile that the response comes in on.

That might sound confusing, so here’s a bit of an example: If I get 2 responses after mile 1, I’ll be making a donation of $.50. If I get 4 responses after mile 12, then I’ll be making a donation of $12.00. After finishing the race (I hope!) I’ll be adding all of this activity together to determine how much I’m giving to the U.N. So, a potential outcome could be the following:

In drumming this idea up, I wanted to see if I could play a part in sparking a fire amongst my circle of friends. In theory, if you choose to interact with me during this race, you’ll be more likely to take some action in your own life to donate to the Haiti relief efforts and potentially, you’ll decide to act to get others involved as well. This is where the retweets and shares will come in to play, I suspect.

Regardless of how many of you choose to participate with me, I’m excited to have a cause to run for tomorrow. I haven’t been actively training for this race for very long (this is my first long race since my marathon in 2008), so I’m a bit nervous about my ability to finish. Holding this cause in my head and hearing from a few of you is going to be a big motivator for me to focus on the most important part of the half marathon: finishing.

So, what do you all think? Anyone in?

**One caveat: there is the very small potential that this gets really "viral", which would be incredible. Given that I’m not independently wealthy (I’m a struggling entrepreneur after all..), I’m going to have to put a cap on how much I end up giving. Hopefully that doesn’t dissuade you from participating in any way, but if it does, I understand. I’ve told 2 people I trust what the cap is (well above the scenario modeled above), so this is something that I take seriously, but I’m keeping the number private because the focus here is really to engender personal participation.**

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