Month: December 2008

by Alexa Clark

Monday night I attended an event built by a community for a community to support our community – #hohoto 

You may have heard of it.  If you are in Toronto, you were probably there too. The place was packed.

Inspired by a single tweet from @austinhill, #hohoto started as a great idea for Toronto's tech community to have a get together and raise a little money for charity. Then it turned into something epic. (And if you think I might be using that word a little loosely, we have someone using #hohoto as part of her PhD research.)

In 2 short weeks, our community has raised $25,000 for Daily Bread Food Bank, becoming one of this year's top 5 third-party fundraisers. We sold out the Mod Club and built a black market for #hohoto tickets on twitter. We generated over 100 pages of tweets (twitter only lets you see 100 pages in search). Right before we lost count, we calculated #hohoto had raised approximately $15 per tweet. 

Leaders in the tech industry & social media community who weren't in Toronto sent in video shout outs to the crowd praising them for making a difference, and even Toronto's Mayor David Miller got his challenge in – for #hohoto to raise $25,000 by the end of the evening.  (Which with a little top of from Molson the next morning was met!)  #hohoto garnering mainstream media attention.  We even got the army's help in collecting all the food donations at the event.

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