This is a "How we did it" written by Simon Painter and BigDaveSB who broke out of the UK and went to africa using nothing but their witts and social media to raise money for KidsCan. They used a range of technology and social media tools to keep everyone uptodate on their progress.  A huge thank you to both of you for sharing this with the sector. - John

What we got up to

At the end of October 2009 we took part in a jailbreak challenge to try to get as far as we could from Manchester in 30 hours. We ended up going on a seventeen and a half thousand mile journey over three continents, seven countries, both hemispheres and a whole heap of time zones. Throughout the adventure we used a mobile phone (a Blackberry flip) and a Bluetooth GPS unit along with a host of social media tools to keep our supporters updated with how we were getting on.

Why we decided to do it like this

Using the social media was an essential for this challenge, partially because we are both a little bit geeky and also because we wanted to give our fund raising efforts a unique selling point. We wanted to get as many donations as possible, and with the help of social media (see below) we were able to get our friends, friends of friends, and beyond, ready and eagerly waiting to see how we were doing.

This also meant that it had to be as easy as possible for people to watch our progress as we went, so they could maintain interest throughout; especially as it was taking place during a working day when many of our friends would be sat at desks with computers to hand. Here's how we did it:

Our Social Media toolbox

Justgiving - our online donation partner

Without doubt the most important part of the whole endeavour was, and still is, raising money for KidsCan. Our whole philosophy was to pull users in to our site with a variety of social media and then funnel them towards our Justgiving page in the hope that they would donate.

We used their stock buttons and widgets to display a large 'sponsor me' button on the site and an animated flash widget to display how our fund raising progressing towards our target.

We made use of the picture upload and 'Our story' section of our personalised Justgiving page to explain again what we were aiming to achieve and had a link to our main site for those who had arrived at the Justgiving page without being funnelled from our own page.

Our site - The Jailbreak (http://jailbreak.ragabonds.org.uk)

Built very simply in HTML & CSS with no complicated content management system, it served as a hub to bring together the different social media tools we were using. Our aim was to bring people into the site from Facebook, Twitter and elsewhere to see our progress on the map and see our other content (the rules of our challenge for example, or the video diary which is now up there); then while they are there, they have some strong reminders to donate via our Justgiving page. We also used the site to showcase our press coverage and thank our sponsors.

We used a widget from BlogLoc to display our position as fed from Fireeagle and we used a fan page widget from Facebook to encourage people to visibly show their support in the run up to the event. My only actual bit of coding in the site was the original RSS parser which displayed the feed of tweets using the #jb4k hashtag but this was because at the time there were no widgets available from Twitter. It was quickly replaced with a nice cascading on once twitter released it (http://twitter.com/goodies/widget_search).

Updating our location with Fireeagle

Fireeagle is the glue which stuck our location tracking together. It's a platform which takes location updates from applications and then distributes it to the location aware applications you choose to allow it to update; we used it in conjunction with an updating application called BBTrackr and then Fireeagle updated a service called BlogLoc which displayed the map and also Eagletweet which tweeted our location.

Updating the world with Twitter

Our first task was to find a unique hashtag we could adopt for the event. Our two key criteria was that it had to be short (140 characters is few enough without using them on long hashtags) and it had to be recognisable.

We settled for #jb4k which in our minds stood for jailbreak 4 (for) KidsCan and tied in nicely with our jailbreak4kidscan Justgiving address.

We tweeted mercilessly for several months leading up to the event so that all our friends and followers knew exactly what we were up to and we were able to use #jb4k to put our tweets into context, for example "@simonpainter is excited about #jb4k" or "@bigdavesb has found a sleeping bag #jb4k".

During the event we tweeted as much as we could whenever we could and kept an eye on a search feed of all posted tagged with #jb4k so we could converse with anyone who was chatting about what we were doing. We were astounded by how much we had by way of retweets and comments on the day and still don't think we've thanked everybody.

Keep the fans upto date with Facebook

Facebook fan pages are a nice easy way to show visible support on your site. We could then post updates into the news feed of our fans to remind them as it got close to the event. We've also kept in touch with our supporters since the event with updates on press coverage and the video diary. We've not seen any drop off in our fans since the event and will probably notify them about any further challenges we take part in.

Youtube a moving record of our trip

Where else would we host our video diary? We used a playlist to make a video longer than ten minutes and then embedded it in our site so it appears as one 35 minute film.

Google Analytics

This has given us some great feedback after the event so we could see how people navigated around our site during the event.

What we did right and what we did wrong

If we ever do something similar again I shall be sure to remove the reliance on infrastructure! The entire 'updated live on the web' thing relied on us having a data connection and plenty of power.

Having batteries for a cell phone which can last 30 hours of continuous use was enough of a challenge (I didn't take a charger, I took 8 fully charged batteries, each of which had a 12 hour standby life); keeping a GPS on for that sort of time (or waiting for it to acquire a signal after it had been moved a few thousand miles whilst switched off) was even tougher.

While using a cellular multi band phone is fine for data services in the western world there is no provision for 3G and GPRS in Angola and very little in Lagos; we had to rely on our fall back plan of an SMS to base where our Fireeagle location was manually updated through the web interface by a lovely chap called Chris at KidsCan.

In future I would probably put in a text message parser to allow me to send an SMS (SMS is part of the GSM protocol and is fairly ubiquitous wherever there is a voice GSM network) to my own server where it can be parsed for location information; this is quite similar to what Rob Smith is doing with chooseachallenge.com

We hope you have found this blog post useful, if so, please thank John for letting us guest blog here, and perhaps show your appreciation at www.justgiving.com/jailbreak4kidscan