Species Survival 2.0

The World Wildlife Fund recently launched the new Facebook application - "Save The Animals" along with several other social marketing platforms. I've become a real fan of Facebook and these types of notifications even though we all have those Facebook friends who just spam you with plants and stuff. But I digress. I really want to see this work for obvious reason but because I also noticed this little sentence in the description of the application: "After expenses in running this application, we will donate revenue to funding various wildlife and conservation projects around the world."

My initial questions are - how much does the cost of running the application affect the overall goal? Does this prevent people from giving toward the project because they feel they might be paying for overhead? Does this affect other organizations who have the idea to run a similar application but might not have the brand strength to support it and see results?

Right now the application itself has more than 900 fans. In addition, the WWF has two "cause" sections you can join with more than 356,000 fans who have raised more than $12,000 through Facebook. Both of those sections seem to point to the same WWF cause page which makes me wonder why there are two of them with different numbers of fans and funds raised. I imagine WWF did it for a reason and might have tried or is currently trying to combine those if even possible.

Ultimately this is a great service and I want to see it work so I became a "fan" of the application and have started sending the different animals/habitats to my friends. I've unlocked 76% or 16 of the 21 featured species from the application so far.

I'll also be contacting the admin of the service to see what insight they might be able to offer and how they feel this type of application helps, why they chose to include it in their marketing plan and what they see as a goal.

Stay tuned as I find out more and let me know what you think.