Law Blogger's Birthday Wish: How About $10, For a Cause?
Law blogger Robert Ambrogi, who was my boss a long long time ago at American Lawyer Media, turned 55 today. I know because Facebook told me.
Celebrating a birthday isn’t generally news, but Ambrogi did something a little different this year. This tech-savvy lawyer, who primarily blogs at LawSites and Legal Blog Watch, and co-hosts the podcast Lawyer2Lawyer, decided to experiment with Facebook causes.
He picked a personal favorite, the Massachusetts Bar Foundation, of which Ambrogi is a trustee and who sits on the organization’s governing board.
Ambrogi tells me he got the idea from Causes on Facebook, which sent him an automated invitation two weeks ago asking him if he’d like to designate a cause for his upcoming birthday.
The MBF wasn’t a listed cause in the Facebook directory, so he asked the organization’s development director, Susannah Thomas, if she could set it up.
This was an experiment to see how, if at all, social networking could benefit the MBF. Thomas finished the task on Monday and Ambrogi registered it as his birthday wish.
As of 6 p.m. Central Time, only four people have honored Ambrogi’s request to skip posting a birthday greeting on his wall and instead donate $10 or whatever someone could afford – maybe the price of a snail mail greeting card?
His goal was to raise $50. And even with four people, he blew that goal out of the water, thanks to two donors who gave $250 each.
“When I set my birthday fundraising goal at $50, I felt as if I was going out on a limb,” Ambrogi wrote me in an e-mail. “When I saw it suddenly jump to $500, I was stunned.”
Ambrogi said he’s particularly grateful to his Facebook friends – Stacy Stern and Tim Stanley of Justia – the moneybag donors.
Not surprisingly, Ambrogi sees social networks as a way to raise money for legal services meant for the poor.
“With IOLTA income down throughout the country, this is a particularly difficult time for organizations such as the MBF that rely heavily on IOLTA money to fund legal programs for the needy,” he said. “I would hope that social networking could prove to be an effective way for these organizations to supplement their fundraising and also to spread the word about the good work they do.”
