Contribution

The Second Life group that I was assigned to make a charity go global, has been working on making social networking site to help create awareness for  the charity TLC4CF. www.tlc4cf.ie and for the disease cystic fibrosis. I had come up with the idea of using a cystic fibrosis charity as I knew a lot about it the disease because of people it had affected around me. The group was overall in favour of doing this and finding a charity related to it. Elly (see blog here https://ellymariec.wordpress.com/) found a local charity that supported and raised money for cystic fibrosis and we decided to chose that.

Its been a very interesting challenge working with people from across the ocean and even one from home that you have never met in real life.  Already there has been a steep learning curve. I think time between us has become the biggest challenge not because we don't have it but we all seem to have it at different stages in the week. Also, which I think is something that needs to be considered when forming groups, we are all in very different stages of our lives being so far and only using social networking to interact slightly detaches you from understanding one another's other obligations  or forming a group  bound. However, these platforms have also created  a great form of interaction between us and allowed us to connect faster and quicker than we be able to before

“A social networking site is an online place where a user can create a profile and build a personal network that connects him or her to other users. In the past five years, such sites have rocketed from a niche activity into a phenomenon that engages tens of millions of internet users”(1).

Social networking sites have also allowed for the group to build on creating a personal identity/brand for our charity. The social networking sites that we chose to build are charities  awareness where Linkedin, Tumblr and Twitter. We each decided to take one of these to set up and take control to allow for the work to be distributed equally Elly took charge of the Linkedin, Kerri set up the Twitter and I started the Tumbler page “ wonderful web tools are just that – they are tools”. I also came up the idea of Give a Rose to Cystic Fibrosis and to incorporate this into Second Life where we would give out roses to avatars in Second Life and ask them to walk around with it and give out 5 other rose to other people they meet and ask them to continue the challenge. This idea was inspired by the ice booked challenge that had became a huge success in 2014 and raised masses amounts of money for Motor Neuron disease. I also designed the logo for the Tumblr page and thought that it could be used throughout the social networking sites to create greater brand identity.

I only hope that are group will be able to spread some of the same awareness for cystic fibrosis and   TLC4CF. www.tlc4cf.ie.

Check out the Tumblr, Twitter and Linkedin pages here

https://www.tumblr.com/dashboard

http://ie.linkedin.com/pub/cystic-fibrosis/b5/b7/404

https://twitter.com/tlc4_cf

Ending Here,

Footnotes

1- Lenhart, Amanda, and Mary Madden. Social networking websites and teens: An overview. Pew/Internet, 2007.

2-  https://virtualworldnmfsfall11. wordpress.com/2011/10/29/painfully-coming-to-grips-with-the-medium-is-the-message/