Who can forget the Ice Bucket Challenge? Thousands of people dumped buckets of freezing ice over their heads in 2014 to raise awareness (and money) for Lou Gehrig’s disease. Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Dick Costolo and several other Silicon Valley technorati drenched themselves for the cause, which raised more than $95 million last year.
Other challenges soon followed, including the #WakeUpCall selfie challenge, which gets celebrities to snap shots of themselves right when they wake up (sure they do) to raise money for UNICEF.
Schoola founder Stacey Boyd came up with the #Passthebag challenge to gather women’s and children’s clothes. Schoola collects the clothing in order to purchase books, art supplies, musical instruments and other items that area schools need for students. The challenge follows the same socially designed pattern as the others: posting about the cause to Twitter and/or Facebook and then naming three successors to do the same.
Boyd nominated Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, LinkedIn’s Jeff Weiner and Creative Artists Agency Foundation founder Michelle Kydd Lee to take up the cause this last week.
Sandberg, who is a big supporter of education, immediately posted the challenge to her Facebook page, naming PopSugar marketing VP Anna Fieler, Path CFO Kim Jabal and Facebook head of HR Lori Goler as her successors.
Both Fieler and Goler quickly accepted and passed the challenge on to others. A quick scan of the challenge’s hashtag on Twitter brings up several hundred posts from those who’ve taken up the cause.
Weiner accepted and posted about Boyd’s call-to-action on his LinkedIn network just yesterday. He then turned around and challenged Index Ventures Danny Rimer, Charles Best from Donors Choose and Sitch CEO Katie Burke Mitic.
Other Silicon Valley technorati are starting to hop on board the challenge train now. Etsy CFO Kristina Salen posted her vow to join the cause late last night.
The challenge started last week with just five San Francisco schools and a number of parents participating. Boyd says participants have added more than 7,400 schools to the participant roster since and that yesterday was one of the best donations days the site has ever had. According to Boyd, parent participation is up 22x the amount Schoola normally gets, and site traffic is up 142x the usual amount, as well.