How To Support Charitable Causes with Your LinkedIn Profile.

Using LinkedIn to Support Charitable Casues

This is an innovative idea which exploits LinkedIn profiles to assist with awareness raising of causes and donations to charities.

I previously explained how rethinking the Projects section of LinkedIn profiles opens up exciting new possibilities, perhaps only limited by our imagination. I have included the video tutorial from that post here too for quick reference.

This is one such idea, in this case about how all of us can use Projects on our profiles to help causes that we personally support and how Charities themselves can make LinkedIn work in new ways for attracting donations.
The first thing we could all do, and encourage each other to do, is use Projects to provide a direct link, writ large, to the website of our chosen Charities, with a short personal statement for each.

Example: on a LinkedIn profile the project entry might look something like this

Click here to visit the website of my charity of choice, [Charity]
I am a member of a project to innovate LinkedIn to help raise awareness of [Charitable Cause]. I support [Charity] because [personal reasons and statement].

But it could work even better than that. If the Charity sets up a URL to a donate buttons which can be accessed by a single click, then this makes it possible for all of us to put this direct link to donations on our profiles. Then the projects link would look something like:

Click here to donate to my charity of choice, [Charity]
I am a member of a project to innovate LinkedIn to help raise awareness of [Charitable Cause]. Would you please consider donating to [Charity] because [personal reasons and statement].

A Charity can then get anyone and everyone who works for them or volunteers for them, and also ask anyone who supports them, to place these prominent Call-to-Action links on their profile in the Projects section.

The number of Project that LinkedIn Users can have on their profile is not small, so there is no reason we can't include both donate and website links and more than one Charity we support.

It seems it could go a bit deeper still, because every Project has a "Members" section and Charities could perhaps exploit this by including all LinkedIn Users who are agree to support them in their Projects Members list. Thus this becomes exactly analogous to Endorsements.