Tweet to Beat: Let Me Up the Ante (Plus: Vietnam School Video and Pics)

Tim Ferriss

15 years ago

The smiles that greeted us at the preschools you helped build in Vietnam. (Photo: Matt)

Thus far, the Tweet to Beat experiment has increased Twitter count from 22,500 to 29,276, which means $20,328 to U.S. public school students via Donorschoose (6,776 new followers x $3 each).

This is good by any reasonable standard, but I’m not reasonable. So here’s what we’re going to do:

1. Every Twitter follower of mine — new and old — will receive a coupon at the end of the campaign for the following:

-6 months of RescueTime’s Pro time tracking tools for free (Normal price: $48). Just install it with no data entry and know exactly how you spend your time. Set thresholds, alarms, or use it for an entire business team. Full disclosure: I am now an investor in RescueTime, as I think they’re the best out there.

-6 months of DropBox’s Pro 50GB account for free. (Normal price: $60) This is a reader favorite. Sync your files automatically to your computers and the web; sign in and access your files from any browser or mobile device. It’s the world’s easiest back-up and syncing service.

-6 months of PhoneTag Alpha, the latest voicemail transcription service, for free (Normal price: $60). This is closed to the public and an exclusive for Tim Ferriss followers (!). Read voicemail on your mobile phone, portable device and/or e-mail. Forget about phone interruptions and suffering through long-winded voicemails.

Total value: $168 to each follower.

2. I’m extending the Tweet to Beat campaign and promo competition another week, until 3/30 at 3:30pm PST.

I will still ante up and pay out the $3 per new follower using 22,500 as the start number. This means you have more time to spread the word and potentially win the round-trip anywhere in the world, the fully-loaded MacBook, and perhaps more.

3. Tomorrow, Tuesday 3/24, at 12pm noon PT (3pm ET), I’m going to send $3 to every Twitter follower I have, not just new followers.

If you aren’t following me on Twitter yet, you can do so here.

This means roughly 30,000 followers x $3 = $90,000. Each $3 will be a unique Donorschoose coupon code, which you can donate to the classroom project of your choice…

I want you to donate the $3 yourself, feel the immense gratification, and do just one thing: please make update your Facebook status during the checkout process to show this donation. This twist has been planned all along, and it should be a force multiplier.

Note the following – very important:

This requires that you visited Facebook in the last ~30 days and chose the “remember me” option. If not, please log out of Facebook and log back in to tick the “remember me” box. It will not work if you just have Facebook open in another tab or window.

Once you get the $3 coupon through Twitter, here are the steps you’ll follow to redeem it:

Sign out of Facebook and sign back in to check the “remember me” box

Pick a classroom project on the Tweet to Beat project page

Check this box

Click “publish” at the end and you’ve done a great deed!

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Life-Changing Proof That Small Actions Matter – Vietnam Pictures and Videos

“Tweet to Beat” is a follow-up experiment to LitLiberation, which was a campaign by bloggers and their readers, and CEOs and their employees, to spread the power of literacy worldwide. It was a new fundraising model based on competition and social media scalability, and it funded not only US public school projects (20,000+ students) but also libraries and schools in developing countries.

I visited two LitLiberation schools in Vietnam two weeks ago with three other donors: Matt Mullenweg, Jose Castro, and Andrew Rosca. It was my first trip to a site we’d constructed, and all of us were absolutely blown away.

More than 500 students per year will be attending these two schools, and both of them cost just $17,000 total. There are many more schools coming, including this school in Nepal, that the readers of this blog helped to build.

Enjoy the footage and pics, and thank you all 🙂