Life & Style

AIDS charity raises $1 million and brings ‘dead’ celebs back to life

Pop stars to rejoin Twitter and Facebook after successfully helping to raise $1 million for charity in one week.

Express December 08, 2010

LOS ANGELES:

World AIDS Day-celebrated every year on December 1 - is all about raising awareness to tackle the HIV prejudice and help stop the spread of HIV.

Pop star Alicia Keys who has been lending her celebrity name in the fight against AIDS for years now, decided to use death as an emotive wake-up call to the world through social networking forums. Keys ,along with a host of celebrities, are marking their own digital deaths on social media sites like Twitter and Facebook.

Keys solicited other stars like Kim and Chloe Kardashian, Ryan Seacrest, Serena Williams, her husband Swizz Beatz, Elijah Wood, Justin Timeberlake, Usher and Lady Gaga to participate in the “digital death” campaign to raise money for her Keep a Child Alive charity. Each celebrity has filmed their “last tweet and testament” videos.

The Grammy-winning singer said it was “really important and super-cool to use mediums that we naturally are on.”

“It’s so important to shock you to the point of waking up. It’s not that people don’t care or it’s not that people don’t want to do something, it’s that they never thought of it quite like that,” said the singer.

Of late, Alicia Keys has been directing people to the “Keep a Child Alive, Digital Death/Buy Life” website where fans can buy back the lives of the dead celebrities. The fund raising goal is to raise $1 million.

By way of example when fans visit Lady Gaga’s Twitter or Facebook pages, they are greeted with a message that Lady Gaga is dead and she will stay dead on Twitter and Facebook until her fans contribute a total of $1 million which means no personalised updates from the celebrity herself until $1,000,000 is raised to buy her life back. Lady Gaga is one of the most influential celebrities in the campaign as she alone has seven million fans on Twitter and 24 million fans on Facebook.

The main problem faced during the campaign was that it took longer than many celebrity watchers thought, as donations reached a grand total of $200,000 in two days. The stars became the butt of jokes on the web, TV and radio and their popularity -- or lack thereof -- was questioned, as was their fans’ desire to keep them digitally dead.

However, after patiently waiting for nearly a week, the stars emerged from their coffins. The campaign managed to reach its target with a generous donation of $500,000 from pharmaceutical entrepreneur Stewart Rahr on Monday.

Keep a Child Alive announced, “Although we never expected to raise $1 million overnight, we are completely blown away that we were able to achieve our goal in less than a week.” More than 3,600 people participated towards the cause, sacrificing their own digital lives.

Keys and her charity’s co-founder Leigh Blake announced the fundraiser’s success on Monday and were estatic at their digital resurrection.

“Alicia Keys is alive!” the singer wrote. “We raised $1 million. To help KCA fight AIDS and save lives! Thank you so much and never stop buying life! Big shout to you! All the artistes involved! And Stewie Rah!” But Keys was not the only excited celebrity. Ryan Seacrest tweeted, “So stoked to be back on Twitter! Special shout out to Stewie Rah for his generous donation.”

The proceeds from the much hyped campaign will go towards the Child Alive organsation that provides help for families afflicted by HIV/AIDs in India and Africa.

Celebrities who sacrificed their digital lives