TweetThanks! And The TweetThanks Challenge

A simple tweet suggesting people join me in starting the day with thanks has snowballed into something worth being thankful for.  One by one, my friends started posting things ranging from the mundane to the magnificent.  The tone of my twitter stream started to change...  complaints decreased and people were taking time to count their blessings. 

This caught the eye of a friend who took the idea and ran with it.  http://www.tweetthanks.com/ was born.  Now, TweetThanks is no longer a random collection of thankful thoughts, it's the beginning of a movement. 

If you go to the site, you can post your own thankful thought, regardless of whether you're generally on twitter, facebook, neither... whatever.  Because really... starting the day with a thankful thought, or even just focusing on the good things in your day, makes a difference in the day as a whole.  And if you're feeling uninspired, I totally invite you to stop by and read the thoughts of others.  It'll brighten your day, I promise. 

And now?  We're starting another initiative.  Instead of simply collecting thanks we are trying to give others something to be thankful for.  Here's the deal:

For the next 7 days, TweetThanks, through the generosity of a donor, will give $.50 to http://www.feedamerica.com/ for every person who either:

1.  Newly follows @TweetThanks on twitter and posts a #tweetthanks or @tweetthanks tweet. 
or
2.  Joins the http://www.tweetthanks.com/ and creates a post with a sentence of thanks.

(Maximum total donation for this portion: $250).  Best part?  This doesn't cost you a dime, just a moment or two of your time, (and a thankful thought of course). 

And, if you're feeling particularly giving, consider making your own donation to http://www.feedamerica.com/.  Every donation will be matched by TweetThanks through a donor. Please forward your donation confirmation email to t@tweetthanks.com so we can keep track of donation totals for matching purposes. (Maximum total donation match for this portion: $250). 

So conceiveably, the people of TweetThanks could donate a total of $750 to http://www.feedamerica.com/.  How cool is that?  Almost as cool as this:  Every donation made to Feed America is currently being matched through a grant.  So our $750 could become $1500.  According to their site, $25 feeds a family for a week.  $1500 could feed that family for over a year.  That's pretty awesome. 

Kindly post a comment on this blog letting me know which you did so we can tally up at the end of the 7 days. 

So here we go, people...  let's take our gratitude and use it to help others.  Spread the word!