MANILA – Sharing her experience in raising the Php250,000 necessary to pay the royalty fees for the use of Whitney Houston’s “Where Do Broken Hearts Go” in her passion project That Thing Called Tadhana, Antonette Jadaone related to an enthralled audience how a sincere plea for help resulted in raising the necessary funds to use the song (a non-negotiable item) in the indie film.
By posting on Facebook a call for at least 450 donors who could give Php500 in exchange for their name to be included in the film’s end credits, the fundraiser was helped along by friends who published details on their own status messages, or spread the word in other media. Result: the money was raised in less than two weeks.
Game-changers, inspirations, and advocates rallied around the #ChangePH hashtag on June 27, 2015 at the Museo Pambata open grounds along Roxas Boulevard. Celebrating the fourth Social Media Day in the country, Starcom Mediavest CEO Leah Besa Jimenez was the keynote speaker at the conference, which also included LGBT advocates Thysz Estrada and Stefan Punongbayan, bitcoin champion Christine Aguilar, and the funny lady lawyers behind The Soshal Network.
The day-long expo saw a large turnout of attendees, who not only availed of the free entrance to the event, but also took advantage of the discounted entrance fees to the children’s museum offered to registrants. TweetUpMNL, the lead organizer of the event since 2012, came to national prominence as during the Habagat floods and typhoons of 2012-2013, when its prime movers pushed the adoption of what are national hashtags: #RescuePH and #ReliefPH.
“This is the biggest, voluntary, not-for-profit, and collaborative social media gathering in the country for four years now,” said Rosario Juan, co-founder of TweetUpMNL. “This event, the milestones we will celebrate and the trends we see in the horizon should prove that social media and the internet are more positive than negative, depending on who uses those technologies and how,” said Juan. “If we use them for changes and innovation that address our needs, #ChangePH not only becomes possible. It happens.”
Blogger and newspaper columnist Tonyo Cruz, also a TweetUpMNL cofounder, commented that “we do things better, work better, achieve more and help solve more problems if we collaborate and cooperate…It is also the Filipino people’s battlecry going into 2016 elections, the biggest changemaking story in the next few months.”
