O.K. so it’s going to be a pretty busy week – all-in-all I think I have three projects going live in the next seven days.

The first of which is Kids Draw for East Africa. I cooked the whole thing up with my wife, Charlotte, who’s one of the many at Made by Many who are the people behind the 5050 good project. The 5050 good project intends to launch 50 projects in 50 days then raise £1million for famine relief in East Africa – a wide range of people have contributed so far, from individuals like Charlotte and I, to groups like Grey, Sapient, Fallon and Dentsu.

As parents of a toddler ourselves, we were both horrified by the child mortality statistics quoted by UNICEF, and decided that we wanted to do something to help.

Our daughter brings armfuls of paintings home from nursery every week and because our extended family are dispersed around the UK, most of the time they don’t get to see her handiwork (apart from the occasional show and tell on Skype).

This gave us the idea that by auctioning kids’ artwork online, we could give grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins and friends the opportunity to pay for something we gave away free.

To keep things really simple we ‘recycled’ the mechanic from Poke’s rather excellent The 100 Project and used eBay to power the auctions. And we’ve taken the decision not to use eBay for Charity because we’d rather there was no 9% cut taken by a third party. Instead, we’ll be donating 100% of the funds direct to UNICEF.

The site went live at the weekend with some truly brilliant contributions from kids aged between 2 and 7. Which means we now need some people to get the bidding going (it’s already quite fierce on a couple of them). We can’t wait to see how competitive different branches of one family can be on outbidding each other in aid of famine relief. And no parent is going to see their child’s painting go for less than a fiver. It’s a win/win situation…

And you can’t underestimate how exciting it is for kids to see their pictures auctioned online, to feel like they’re actually doing something directly to help other people.

So, if you have kids and would like to take part there are more details here, but it’s pretty simple – just send us a photo of their drawing to kidsdraw5050[at]gmail[dot]com, with their first name, age and title of the drawing. And we’ll get in touch with you with the address of where to send it when the auction is over.

Otherwise log into e-bay and get bidding.

I gave this presentation on how to develop successful social media campaigns a couple of days ago alongside others from Bob Egner from Episerver and social commerce expert Paul Marsden. It’s a partial summary of a longer piece that we’re publishing at the end of the month which is intended as a practical guide to developing campaigns and concepts, focusing on what does and doesn’t work from our experience as well as what we see as industry best practice.

We’re also rolling out a big pan-European social media campaign based on this framework in about a month’s time, so you’ll doubtless hear more about this sort of stuff from me for a while.