While on Mashable today, I found this article about World Malaria Day, which I just found out is today, April 25th. According to the article, the “ international malaria community has less than a year to meet the targets of ‘delivering effective and affordable protection and treatment to all people at risk of malaria,’ as set forth by the United Nations.” As ways to reach more people and raise awareness, the article points out five different things you and I can do to help out.
1. Text to Donate $10 and Retweet an Official Message- If you’re really short of time then you can text NETS to 864233 which will see $10 charged to your phone bill.
2. Retweet to Donate $10-Thanks to the RT2Give twitpay service you can retweet one simple message to donate $10 to Malaria No More, which is roughly the amount required to buy one mosquito net.
3. Download the Nothing But Nets Toolbar-If you’re an Internet Explorer or Firefox user the downloading (and crucially using) the Nothing But Nets browser toolbar will mean that every time you use the toolbar to search and shop online, you will raise money for Nothing But Nets
4. Follow the Social Media Envoy-The Social Media Envoy group, organized by the United Nations, is a collective of people who have agreed to spread the word about malaria prevention through the medium of social media. The group includes the likes of Bill Gates, Biz Stone and Kevin Rose.
5. Raise a hand to End Malaria with DailyBooth-DailyBooth is asking people to pass on the simple message to “End Malaria” with the simple gesture of writing the phrase on your hand, snapping a pic and sharing it with the hashtag “#endmalaria” which will mean the mosquito icon will appear on your photo, and in your friend’s dashboard.
I really like the use of social media in this endeavor, and the way they are using twitter to help such an important cause. The last way they mentioned to help, also seems pretty interesting in the sense that a lot of young people would probably be interested in doing this, which would further spread awareness and get the word out.