This Tuesday, December 2nd marks #GivingTuesday, a global day of giving where charities, community and companies from around the world come together for one common purpose: to celebrate generosity and to give.
For those of you unfamiliar with the movement, it follows Black Friday and Cyber Monday and was founded in 2012 by 92nd Street Y in New York in partnership with the United Nations Foundation. Since then, the movement has been making waves in social media, sparking hundreds of volunteer projects and resulting in millions of donations towards charity globally.
As with many movements, its success owes to the very fact that it’s owned by everyone.
Activities around this day dedicated to giving are diverse and include CrowdRise’s Giving Tower, a collaborative effort to show the world’s philanthropic impact on #GivingTuesday with every donation visualized as a brick in the tower.
The hashtag #unselfie is another giving meme, popularized by the #GivingTuesday movement, where people show their support by taking a pic and tagging it with #unselfie and #givingtuesday and uploading it to Instagram, Twitter or Facebook.
Here in our hometown of Vancouver, Hootsuite is bringing together leaders in the tech community for #Tech4GoodYVR, an auction that funds code camps to teach coding skills to underprivileged kids in our community. Up for auction are unique 1-on-1 opportunities with the city’s notable tech leaders, including Vision Critical Founder Andrew Reid, BuildDirect CEO Jeff Booth, Hootsuite’s own Ryan Holmes and many others.
The campaign is kicked off by a panel to ignite a conversation around how the tech community that we’re a part of is giving back. We’ve brought together social impact leaders from different sectors including nonprofits, government and tech, to discuss the role tech companies have to play in contributing to the well being of the communities they are part of.
Whether you post an #unselfie or bid to have lunch with our CEO, we encourage you to be part of the biggest giving day of the year.