Wednesday, December 1, 2010

Alicia Keys is Dead! Social Entrepreneurship is Alive!


Alicia Keys is digitally dead. Today is Worlds AIDS Day.  To raise money and awareness for Keys’ charity Keep a Child Alive for children orpaned from the AIDS epidemic, Alicia Keys and other celebrities are digitally dying. No twitter, facebook, vlogs or blogs for them. When $1 million total from individual contributions has been donated to the charity, they will comeback alive. 

I admire Keys savvy on this project. While the sole motivation for charity donation should be to contribute to a social cause, Keys realizes this isn't so. If it were, charities wouldn’t have to work hard to raise money.  As a celebrity, she is aware that people invest a lot as fans. Millions of dollars of fan money go into tours, music, movies, and any merchandise with their favorite celebs name on it. She figured why not take a break from the digital world and wager fans will donate to keep their favorite celeb digitally alive. 

A social entrepreneur is an entrepreneur who creates a business for the sole purpose of donating profits to a social cause and maintaining the business.  Alicia keys’ passion for social causes have manifested into her being a savvy social entrepreneur. Her project, Digital Death, is an amazing integration of social media and celebrity. Best of all, it is for charity. The marketing campaign has been well thought out. For about a week, the web has been splattered with pictures of celebrities posed in Buylife t-shirts, some in coffins to further spread their “death”, “official” last tweets and video testaments. It should take up to half the day for $1 million to come in. With $10 per fan, Alicia Keys having about 2 million followers, others celebs with thousands and thousands of followers, this event should raise well over 1 million dollars and I hope it does.

*you can go to buyalife.org or text “ALICIA” to 90999 to donate. For more info on the charity go to keepachildalive.org. For more information about World AIDS Day, got to worldaidsday.org

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