Late yesterday evening, after a busy day juggling work with twittering about 7wondersin7days, I came across a blog post by popular tech blog Mashable about Twollars, a new currency for fund raising on Twitter.

Initially I raised an eyebrow.  To be honest, if I wasn’t consumed with getting the fundraising ball rolling for 7 wonders in 7 days I wouldn’t have given the post a second look.

However, I decided to investigate, visiting Twollars page on Twitter and came across this article by Guardian reporter, Frances Booth aka @souvent.

She describes it best:

Perfectly designed as a credit crunch currency the twollar, at the outset at least, costs you nothing. Every Twitter user starts with 50 twollars; 10 are equal to $1, but this value only takes a monetary form when twollars are bought from charities.

Twitter users can give twollars to each other (perhaps as a mark of appreciation for a particularly good tweet, or as a gift), but only charities can receive money for them. They can sell them for hard cash to users who want to replenish their supplies and keep giving to friends and other charities.

The concept has already raised more than $1,500 for Charity Water, with Camfed and Vitamin Angels also running successful fundraising campaigns.

I signed up 7 Wonders In 7 Days as a charity straightaway, filling the straightforward sign-up form on the Twollars website.   You can see our page on Twollars.com.

I entered in the 7 Wonders in 7 Days PayPal account on the sign up page meaning that twollars can be converted to donations identical to those received via our Donate page.

It remains to be seen how effective Twollars become as a currency of appreciation on Twitter but already I’ve enjoyed giving them to @souvent and @twollars!  I gave them away via my @realfreshtv ‘work Twitter account’.

Already the idea appears to have captured the imagination of the charity and non-profit sector with ‘social media for non-profits’ blog, Wild Apricot publishing a handy overview of the service.

Prior to signing up for Twollars I got very excited about the first blog post about the 7 Wonders in 7 Days campaign.

It’s written by Manchester blogger extraordinaire, Martin Byrant who incidently also makes music as Star Fighter Pilot.  Please take a minute to read it, it’s funny!

Here’s my favourite quote:

“You’d have to be mad to try, right? Well Chi-chi Ekweozor is obviously insane.”

Thanks again for the compliment Martin!  I’ve received some fantastic responses to that blog post and will be sharing them tomorrow.

Back to Twollars. Over to you.

Continuing with the challenge started at the end of Frances’ article, who else should I be giving Twollars to?

Shout out in the comments!