Why should you dumping a bucket of ice water on you head influence me to give money to charity?
It doesn't matter
why it works. It matters
that it works. As for the why, I can only speculate. You might be a fan of mine, the entertainment from seeing me dump a bucket of water on my head put you in your sweet spot, and then I got all charismatic and asked you to fork over some of your money to a charity, and so you did. It might not work on you, personally, but it works on a lot of people.
Did you really play a part or did you just pass the buck (so to speak) to get others to donate for you?
I don't think that strictly matters, either. To me, what matters is that through my actions money has been donated.
I think that this is a case where celebrity status can make a big difference. If Lebron James or Oprah do a publicity stunt like this for awareness, that's one thing. Somehow or other, I doubt that some random idiot pouring a bucket of ice water on their head is going to influence much of anybody to shell out any money.
Well, yes and no. I dunno about outside of the UK, but here people frequently do things like shave their heads or play a racing video game for 32 hours straight for charity. Those two examples are things my friend has done, the first one being a "S(h)ave the fuzz?" vote, where through charity donations you got to decide whether or not he'd keep his scalp fuzzy or not. Whichever side donates more wins, and, well, he did have to shave his head. The latter was him and a few friends playing a game and streaming it. At some point one of them danced. In each case, he secured a reasonable amount of money (i think it was in the hundreds on both occasions) for some charity. Sure, it's not as big as it would be if a celebrity did it, but it still works.
In fact, it'll probably just encourage people to dump ice water on their heads just to show how trendy they are.
That will probably happen too, sure.
If anything, I think that it's being done backwards. Instead, you should do it as a fund raiser. Say that for for a given amount of money pledged, then you'll dump the water on you head. This way you can say that you actually did something besides waste a bucket of ice water.
I think that both methods have their pros and cons. Perhaps one would turn out to be objectively better than the other, I honestly don't know. However, I feel that my point still stands. Even if I can't tell whether or not this is
the best way to do things, I can say with confidence that it's a way that works to some extent and is clearly not useless.