Twitter’s annual Year In Review rolled out in stages this year, first giving us the year in Twitter stories and following that up with stats about the new additions to the Twitter community as well as top hashtags, topics, and tweets per second records.

This last (so far) leg of the Year In Review is the Golden Tweet Award, which is awarded to a tweet that was not only the most retweeted, but also had an impact in terms of social good.

The award goes to a tweet from Wendy’s, which asked users to retweet for a good cause. Each retweet sent 50 cents to the Dave Thomas Foundation for adoption. It looks like helping foster kids is a great motivation to get people to retweet, because the tweet helped raise $50,000 for the charity. By my math, that’s at least 100,000 retweets.

Wendy’s acknowledged their award accordingly:

The promotion is not just a Twitter thing, it is actually part of an annual Father’s Day initiative by Wendy’s. This year, including the retweet contributions, they raised $1.8 million for Dave’s charity.

Although this year’s most retweeted tweet did more to help children, it’s definitely not as funny as last year’s top tweet. That honor went to Stephen Colbert with this oil-spill themed gem:

Did you see Wendy’s Golden tweet out there in the Twitterverse? Did you retweet it? Let us know in the comments.