A recent article in the Huffington Post details how social media can be used to help the homeless. This post drew my attention because I have never really heard of any organizations that deal with homelessness having a social media presence.
Mark Horvath created InvisiblePeople.tv an website that shows videos of people that have deal with or are currently struggling with the issue of homelessness. The site is well made and easy to navigate. There is a caution sign on the homepage of the site saying “Caution: Some content may be offensive. Our hope is you’ll get mad enough to do something.” Marks goal is to inspire people to get involved.
And he has, Julia Moulden is the founder of BakeSpace – a social website where people can share recipies and create cookbooks. Julia and Mark teamed up to create a cookbook to sell on Julia’s site with the profits going to Mark’s organization. They started a Twitter campaign that has been fairly successful.
It’s great that these two social websites were able to team up and use Twitter to draw attention to each organization and raise money to combat homelessness. This is a neat example of how causes that may not have the cutest beneficiaries (animals, puppies, etc.) can still effectively use social media.
