How these nonprofits cracked the code with engaging campaigns that turned followers into donors

Post by Zoe Allen

Social media is proving to be the future of nonprofit outreach. No other platform offers the same huge global reach for promoting awareness of important issues that too often elude the public’s attention.

Some nonprofits are doing a stellar job in creating social media campaigns that are engaging, inspiring – and effective. Below are some outstanding examples of nonprofits that have run social media campaigns that moved the needle to further their cause.

Here are eight top cause campaigns to be inspired by … and to learn lessons from.

Make-A-Wish’s YouTube Channel

1The Make-A-Wish Foundation has become a household name in recent years with its unique goal of fulfilling the wishes of ill and vulnerable children, from visiting Disneyland to meeting celebrities. They have their solid social media presence to thank for their success, too.

Make-A-Wish is all about personal stories and experiences, which makes compelling content that people really want to know about. It’s also a major driver of converting supporters to donors. The organization uses YouTube videos to show the world these interesting stories, driving support for their cause. As a result of their inspiring content, they have grown into a household brand and can help thousands of children fulfill their wishes.

Explore Make-A-Wish’s YouTube channel.

This video by WATERisLIFE has garnered more than 7 million views.

WATERisLIFE: #firstworldproblems

2Here’s a great example of how you can use hashtags, images or ideas that are already popular across social media to further your nonprofit.

WATERisLIFE used the already viral hashtag #firstworldproblems to undergird an emotion-laden video. In the video, people in dire, life-threatening situations, such as having no access to clean water, repeat common “first world problems.” It highlighted the privilege of the hashtag users and the power to use social media to do true good.

The organization ensured that this popular hashtag, even after its campaign had ended, would continue to remind people that they could help others. In addition to using this hashtag, their First World Problems Anthems video was also shared and viewed thousands of times.

Project Life Jacket

3Project Life Jacket used a unique visual idea to catch their supporters’ attention. Three Swiss organizations (The Voice of Thousands, Borderfree and Schwizerchruz) interview nine refuges who had travelled across the Mediterranean, then beautifully illustrated their stories on used life jackets that had washed up on beaches.

The campaign reminded supporters that each refugee was a person with a past and a story — and more than their refugee status. When supporters understood the refugees’ stories, their empathetic response turned into action. Like Make-A-Wish, the approach shows how well supporters react to personal stories on social media and the power of visual content on these platforms.

Take a look at the Facebook page for Project Life Jacket.

truth: #BigTobaccoBeLike

4This campaign shows the power of social media for spreading awareness of important issues, rather than just for increasing donations. Using a popular Internet phrase (“be like”), truth aimed to show the issues with social smoking and dispel the myth that smoking was acceptable if it was irregular. It explained how even if you only smoke at parties, you are still supporting companies that profit off fueling illness and addiction.

Social media has the power to destroy myths and spread the truth.

truth also leveraged the power of YouTube influencers, working with popular faces to produce videos that played off the kind of short-form content that propelled the popularity of the now defunct platform Vine. They leveraged humorous content along with the millions-strong audiences of these famous faces.

Like WATERisLIFE’s campaign, truth showed that using the trends and audience that is already out there is very important in social media marketing. Take a look at truth’s Twitter page, which has 126,000 followers.

WaterAid: #giveashit

5WaterAid’s campaign aimed to make a serious issue more fun. They asked popular figures to personalize and share a poop emoji and created a free app so anyone could create a personalized poop emoji. It aimed to add a more lighthearted tone to raise awareness about a serious issue that affects millions of people’s lives worldwide.

This campaign shows the importance of creativity and participation to engage your supporters and encourage donations. If something is fun, humorous or interesting, people are much more likely to share it, spreading the reach of your message and growing your donor base.

Read more about the campaign or download the app.

World Wildlife Fund: #endangeredemoji

6After World Wildlife Fund discovered that 17 endangered animals had popular corresponding emojis, it sought to translate the popularity of the emojis into donations. WWF encouraged supporters to retweet an image on Twitter, which in turn signed them up to donate 10 pence (about 14 cents) every time they posted one of the endangered emojis.

Like WaterAid’s campaign, it shows how powerful the use of emojis can be to engage supporters. Again, this project harnessed innovation and creativity to make engaging with a nonprofit more interesting for their donors.

Visit WWF’s Twitter page, or read more on the WWF website.

National Trust: #NTchallenge

7National Trust taps into the passion of its supporters and their beautiful photography to spread the word about its beautiful sites. They regularly run weekly challenges urging supporters to upload images, tagged to #NTchallenge, that revolve around a theme, such as “places that transport you back in time.” They repost the images on their profiles and choose winners for each category.

Like many of the other campaigns here, the #NTchallenge aims to make spreading awareness about their cause fun and interesting for their supporters. By showing how beautiful these places are, they can encourage more visitors, earning more donations, which can then be spent on the upkeep of their sites.

National Trust leveraged the beauty of imagery on Instagram for this project — see their profile. Again, this shows how important it is to use the individual strengths of each platform.

The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge

8One of the most successful social media fundraising projects of all time, the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge had thousands of participants, gained national press coverage and raised millions for the ALS Association.

Once again, this project focused on making fundraising fun, and engaging supporters in an interesting way. This challenge, spread across multiple social media platforms, dared supporters to throw a bucket of iced water over their heads and share the video online. As well as spreading awareness, the participants would then donate to the ALS Association and encourage friends to repeat the challenge and do the same. The prospect of humorous videos from friends allowed the campaign to spread quickly.

Read more on the ALS Association website.

Wrapping up

These campaigns show the importance of establishing a recognizable brand for your campaign. Try using hashtags to do this and to allow the campaign to spread quickly.

The list also shows the genius of using features already available or using a trend or hashtag that is already popular – such as in WaterIsLife’s #firstworldproblems campaign. You should also make sure you’re tapping into the possibilities of multiple channels with their different content types and audiences.

If you want to know more about social media for nonprofits, you can read our Ultimate Guide to Social Media for Nonprofits.

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Target audience: Nonprofits, cause organizations, foundations, NGOs, fundraisers.

I‘ve seen my share of fundraising campaigns over the years, but one of the most impressive has to be the campaign put on by Brianna Haag and her team of volunteers for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society.

The nonprofit’s fundraising competition, which started 22 years ago and now exists in 73 chapters of the organization nationwide, generated some great events at the local level this year. Coming out on top was Slap Cancer, a 10-week series of events in the San Francisco Bay Area that raised $207,000 for blood cancer research and garnered Brianna honors as the Society’s Woman of the Year.

Brianna shared her thoughts on how other organizations can use social media and event planning to hit their fundraising goals in this 6-minute video interview on Vimeo.

Not only did Brianna’s Slap Cancer campaign take the winning title, it actually set a new local record for most funds raised. It’s also the first year in a long time that the female winner raised more than the male winner. One of the Bay Area events, Mr. Marina, went viral thanks to social media and the buzz that was generated in the young professionals community.

Brianna, who’s the San Francisco event evangelist for Eventbrite, points out the power of an online ticketing agency like Eventbrite to generate and track ticket sales to the real-world events taking place over the course of the campaign.

5 ways to create a successful cause campaign

I asked Brianna to sum up the campaign’s learnings for other organizations looking to run cause campaigns, and she came up with these five recommendations for event organizers:

1Use social media to spread the word and spread out your donor pool! The more people who find out about your event, the better. Eventbrite has found that shares on Facebook are worth an average of $2.52 each, which means there’s a huge value in people sharing events with their networks. Take advantage of that!

2Monitor your ticket sales regularly. The most successful fundraisers are those who log in daily to monitor ticket sales. That way, if things aren’t going according to plan, figure out a plan B. Pinpoint what isn’t working as early on as possible so you can adapt.

3Get as many people as you can to have a vested interest in the success of your event, because those are the people who will help you spread the word.

4The majority of ticket sales occur in the week leading up to the event, which is stressful. Try to promote early ticket purchases by offering early-bird prices and offer discount codes to people whom you’d like to target with special pricing.

5Set a plan and work backward with your goals. Set a total that you want to raise and then benchmarks of how you’re going to get there. How many tickets do you need to sell to reach your goals? How can you track progress to ensure that you’re on pace leading up to the event?

Brianna and the Slap Cancer volunteers did everything from taking over AT&T Park to hosting a fantasy batting practice with the San Francisco Giants’ J.T. Snow to a Mr. Marina event at the Mezzanine nightclub with 1,000 people.

Impressive all the way around — and a good use of social media to drive attendance at real-world events, which we always point to as a campaign’s ultimate success.

Note: Nonprofits can get $100 toward their first event on Eventbrite by signing up at http://eventbrite.com/britesf

Related

• Crush your Fundraising Challenge and the end result (Brianna Haag on Eventbrite)

• 7 tips to attract more donors for your cause (Socialbrite)

• Social fundraising tools for nonprofits & causes (Socialbrite)

• 10 tips for a successful fundraising event (Socialbrite)

• Understanding the return on fundraising events (Socialbrite)

• Fundraising articles on Socialbrite

The post Slap Cancer: 5 lessons from a successful cause campaign appeared first on Socialbrite.

Target audience: Cause organizations, NGOs, nonprofits, foundations, social enterprises, political reformers, educators, journalists, general public.

Over the past three years, as regular readers know, Socialbrite has put together dozens of guides and compilations of resources and tools for social change advocates. See the bottom of this article for a few, and our Sharing Center is all about social tools for social change.

To celebrate Internet at Liberty, a conference on protecting protecting freedom of expression on the Internet that Google is organizing in Washington, D.C., this week — and where Socialbrite is running the social media workshops — we’re launching a new section today:

The Social Advocacy Toolkit features new and updated informational guides, tool roundups and resources for global activists, social good advocates, political reformers, NGOs and anyone looking to use online tools for social change. It includes tactics for effective campaigns, guides to the best monitoring and metrics tools (many of them free), lists of enabling platforms and organizations and other resources to help galvanize your campaign.

Below is a new guide that we’ve put together to help social change activists with their advocacy efforts, which we’re adding to the toolkit. Check out the Social Advocacy Toolkit for much more.

10 tools for activists & social change advocates

Asana: A leap ahead for productive teamwork

1Asana is a work-collaboration software suite that came out of beta in April 2012. “We built this company to change the world,” said founder Dustin Moskovitz, one of the co-founders of Facebook. Asana offers a simple, word processor-like interface to give people working together on a task a central place to discuss the project, share files and keep track of to-dos in real time. It’s free for teams of fewer than 30 users.

Alternatives: Yammer, Microsoft Sharepoint (for larger enterprises) and see our Collaboration roundup

PopVox: Advocate your cause in Congress

2You might remember our recent article on PopVox, an online service that individuals and grassroots organizations can use to lobby members of Congress on behalf of a cause. CEO Marci Harris founded the nonpartisan service based on her knowledge of how Congressional staffers interact with the public. For a cause to be effective, it has to be made concrete on behalf of or against a specific bill. PopVox helps you do that.

Geo-bombing with Google Earth

3I was blown away when I saw Tunisian activists from the collective blog Nawaat.org (The Core) link video testimonies of Tunisian political prisoners and human rights defenders to the Tunisian presidential palace’s location on Google Earth. Now, as you fly over the Tunisian presidential palace using a Google Earth KML file, you will see it covered with videos about human rights abuses that strongman Ben Ali tried to prevent Tunisian citizens from watching by blocking YouTube and DailyMotion. Visit earth.google.com/outreach for more examples. We’d like to see more organizations to take up “geo-bombing.”

Mapping tools: Show, don’t tell

4Any campaign or cause organizations with tech talent should consider following the steps of charity: water, which does a remarkable job of documenting their clean-water projects for individual donors through the use of Google Maps. Paull Young, their director of digital engagement, told me: “We’ve been marking all our water projects with GPS since we were founded in 2006. We had a developer crank for a few weeks late last year to create this new mapping solution. It’s not incredibly technically difficult, the hardest part is getting data from the field. You might also want to check out our Dollars to Projects reporting for even more in-depth personalized mapping.” Also doing a good job with Google Maps: A Child’s Right.

Note: Google began charging for its previously free Google Maps API last year, leading to an exodus to the open source OpenStreetMap, which we expect will continue to get better and better.

Tableau Public: Infographics made simple

5You may have noticed the Infographics Everywhere trend that’s sweeping the Web, probably spurred by the fact that infographics has been democratized — you no longer need to be a graphics guru to make a swift-looking graphic. Why not boil down your cause or campaign to a couple of key infographics? The tool we like best is Tableau Public, because it’s good and it’s free. For visualizations, Wordle and Many Eyes create great-looking word clouds. But before you plunge in, see this fantastic set of Data Visualization and Infographics Resources from Smashing Magazine — and make sure what you create isn’t info porn.

Statf.ly: Create a metrics dashboard

6What’s a campaign without a metrics dashboard, to tell you with data-driven evidence what’s resonating with your community — and what’s falling flat? There are a few newcomers to consider: Statf.ly (we like the 30-day free trial and $19/month pricetag), Sparkwi.se and Metricly. It’s worth the investment. See which one works for you and gives your campaign traction and tweak your campaign on the fly.

Dropbox: Life in the cloud is sweet

7I’ll be straight up: My hands-down favorite productivity and collaboration tool of the decade so far has been Dropbox. What was life like before the cloud? Oh, yeah, it was a pain to get stuff done. Dropbox is a free service that lets you bring your photos, docs and videos anywhere with an Internet connection — and share them easily. Any file you save to your Dropbox will automatically save to all your computers, phones and even the Dropbox website. Never email yourself a file again! Dropbox gives you 2GB of storage space for free, plus 500MB more if you refer a friend who signs up. It can get pricey when moving up to Dropbox for Teams, so see what your budget allows.

CitizenTube: Get visibility for your cause videos

8CitizenTube is YouTube’s News and Politics Blog. You’ll find important breaking news videos from citizens and other newsworthy videos from news organizations, activists and politicians. You are creating your own media, right? Why not get it seen by YouTube’s legion of viewers? See a different version of it here, and follow @CitizenTube on Twitter.

Buffer: Cross-posting nirvana

9If you’re running a cause campaign, there aren’t enough hours in the day, right? So think productivity. Shonali Burke, who recently left Socialbrite, told me: “Buffer is killer. It lets you send updates to Facebook, Twitter, etc. straight from your Google Reader or a browser. You can also post them directly from Buffer. Spread them out over the day. I’m just loving it and using HootSuite less. I tend to do most of my reading via Reader, and it’s super easy to star the posts that interest me, then sort by starred items, and then add to Buffer.” The basic version is free, for up to 10 posts at a time; for heavy users, you can get the paid version.

GroupMe: Keep in touch with your team members

10If you’re at an event — a conference, a street protest, a peaceful march — with other team members, you know how difficult it it to stay in touch and to coordinate plans. Socialbrite recently gave GroupMe a test run and came away impressed. GroupMe is a free group messaging app. I like it because it’s both instant and asyncronous — that is, your teammates will see your updates instantly or when they next check their mobile devices. Call up GroupMe and invite others in your posse to join your private group. Type your update and send it to the group, as you would an SMS message, and they’ll see it in a chat thread. One of GroupMe’s key features is that it’s cross-platform: You don’t miss a beat whether you have an iPhone, Android, Blackberry or another kind of smartphone. In addition to the ability to share messages, photos and locations like the other apps, GroupMe also allows old-fashioned conference calls between group members.

Alternative: Facebook Messenger

Other tools worth a shoutout

The tools above aren’t the only ones that should be in your advocacy arsenal. Consider some of these as well:

• See our writeup on Digital Democracy and its Handheld Human Rights mobile platform for human rights in Burma/Myanmar.

• GeoChat, from InSTEDD (Innovative Support to Emergencies Diseases and Disasters), is a collaboration tool that allows anyone to chat, report and get alerts on their cellphone and to map data on Google Earth, Google Maps or Virtual Earth. It uses SMS, email, and Twitter.

• Ushahidi and Frontline SMS are must-have mobile tools for anyone working with remote communities or in disaster relief areas. And they have broader uses as well.

• Join.me is a cross-platform screen sharing app that lets you give control of your computer screen to someone else.

• Shortstack, says my partner John Haydon, “is my number one choice for creating amazing Facebook Page custom tabs. You can create photo contents, reveal tabs, photo galleries and more. Check out this example of what you can create with Shortstack.” It costs $15 a month to start.

• NodeXL is a tool for finding connections between people or organizations. Mostly for geeks as it’s a bit daunting.

• If This, Then That is another interesting tool I just discovered. It helps you create certain actions when a task is triggered, like “send me a text message when my organization is mentioned on Facebook.”

• Jing from TechSmith, Screenr and Screenflow for Mac are three of the best tools for creating screencasts.

Guides for social change advocates

Here are some of Socialbrite’s other guides for social change:

• Change-makers share 10 of their favorite tools (JD Lasica)
• 12 open source tools you should be using (Kim Bale)
• 12 awesome platforms for social good (Katrina Heppler)
• An educator’s 5 top tools for social change (Barbara K. Iverson)
• Top 5 tools for the entrepreneurial journalist (Dan Pacheco)
• A change agent’s top 5 tools for social change (Allyson Kapin)
• A developer’s 5 favorite social tools (Nathan Freitas)
• 6 productivity tools for social change (Katrina Heppler)
• Complete guide to creating a video project (Tim Davies)

Related

• Making media: Tools & resources for nonprofits and social change organizations (Socialbrite)
• 10 top collaboration tools for your organization
• The Socialbrite Sharing Center
• Directory of cause organizations (Socialbrite)

The post 10 top tools for cause campaigns appeared first on Socialbrite.

How the power of collective buying is helping local cause campaigns around the country

Guest post by Patty Huber
G-Team Manager, Groupon

By now you’ve likely heard of Groupon, which allows consumers to get local deals on the best things to do, eat, see and buy in their own cities.

But do you know about G-Team, which uses the same concept of a collective buying power to connect people to causes in their local communities? G-Team, Groupon’s main philanthropic program, launched a year ago this month in Chicago and was modeled on the original vision for Groupon as a platform for collective action and fundraising.

G-Team provides a platform for organizations and causes to garner the support of their local community and even solicit money for campaigns or project-based initiatives. Through the G-Team page, nonprofits, cause organizations and individuals can apply to have their campaign featured.

G-Team runs campaigns that focus on project-specific ideas, allowing participants to see tangible results in their community. When a campaign goes live, the featured organization is encouraged to gather as many participants as possible to reach the tipping point. If enough people buy in, the project is funded and the campaign organizer receives a check to accomplish his or her intended goal.

G-Team campaigns are currently operating in 12 Groupon markets, and each week a new campaign is selected to be featured on the daily deal site for its city. The Groupon markets with G-Team campaigns include Atlanta, Austin, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, New York, Philadelphia, Portland, San Francisco and Washington, D.C. In the coming months, G-Team will be expanding to about 70 more Groupon markets.

Watch the video below to learn more about what G-Team does and how it can benefit your cause:

G-Team eyes 2,000 campaigns in the coming year

The photo at top shows an example of a recent G-Team campaign for the Save-A-Pet Adoption Center. It raised enough to supply a week of food for 1,532 dogs and cats, which freed up additional funds for other rehabilitation services. Put another way, for every $700 G-Team raised, 100 dogs and cats were fed for one week. In this way, each subscriber was able to identify the tangible results of their $7 dollar donation to the Save-A-Pet Adoption Center. With the tipping point set at 100 buyers, the power of collective action proved to be an important motivation toward reaching the set goal.

Since its launch last year, G-Team has run 217 campaigns, ranging from funding a local after-school program, to building a community garden and collecting supplies for a local food bank.

G-Team has a unique model for supporting philanthropic fundraising, civic engagement and social events. We do not however, support fundraising that is intended for general operating funds. Organizations interested in participating can apply to be featured through a link on the G-Team home page. The application is a short process in which the organization identifies and provides information about its project-specific needs. G-Team coordinators then review the application and determine if the campaign is a good fit for the G-Team model. With our expansion into new markets, we hope to be able to feature more than 2,000 campaigns in the coming year.

The post G-Team: Groupon’s program to support causes appeared first on Socialbrite.

Make it easy to participate, make it mobile — and don’t forget the fun!

One of the great success stories of online advocacy has been DoSomething.org, a not-for-profit that encourages young people to use the power of online to “do good stuff offline.”

Last fall I moderated a panel at BlogWorld Expo with DoSomething chief technology officer George Weiner, and last month I co-presented a Social Media for Social Good bootcamp at the National Conference on Volunteering and Service with George.

So during a brief break in the action I got him to talk about how DoSomething spurs 1.2 million young people a year to take action on behalf of a social cause they care about.

“Young people have this amazing thing they can do that doesn’t require car, money or an adult,” he says. Simply put, any young person — 25 or younger, with a sweet spot of 16- to 17-year-olds — can launch a social cause campaign about any cause they feel passionately about.

The nation’s largest cause site for young people, DoSomething has about 30,000 cause projects started by young people.

Watch, embed or download the video on Vimeo

Success comes down to a combination of factors

The annual DoSomething Awards airs on VH1 in August.

The site’s success comes down to these factors:

• They make it easy to participate by lowering the barriers to entry.

• They’re laser-focused on catering to young people.

• They make it easy to take part in campaigns via mobile devices.

• They try to make causes fun by emphasizing use of participants’ social networks.

“This generation is far more engaged than anyone can possibly understand or measure due to the amount of conversations going on in social media,” George says.

For instance, DoSomething partnered with Better World Books on the Epic Book Drive, a campaign that collected more than 250,000 books to benefit the Recovery School District in New Orleans.

Head to DoSomething to find a cause that resonates with you. And don’t forget to look for the DoSomething Awards on VH1 in August. Have a question or need help? Text HELPME to 30644.

The post How DoSomething engages young people appeared first on Socialbrite.

And download these 3 flyers on tools & platforms for social change

Last night I gave another in the series of Mobilize Your Cause mini-camps at the Hub SoMa in San Francisco. It went well, with representatives from Women’s Film Institute, CBS Interactive, Small Act and a number of startups and consultancies coming by to do a deep dive into how to use social media to move the needle for your cause or organization.

My partner and colleague Sloane Berrent wasn’t in town for the joint presentation, but Pamela Hawley, founder and CEO of UniversalGiving, came by and offered some great thoughts about the importance of stepping back and identifying your organization’s story — its core value proposition — before diving into the toolsets. Her recent trip to the White House with 50 other social entrepreneurs drew a number of questions from people eager to connect with the social enterprise community.

Handouts on social action hubs, mobile apps & more

For the event, Socialbrite produced three new or modified flyers — download them for free and repost on your site!:

• 12 Social Action Hubs — Online communities and crowdsource platforms (shortener: bit.ly/12socialhubs — PDF)

• 10 Mobile Apps for Social Good (shortener: bit.ly/10mobileapps — PDF)

• 12 Steps to Mobilize Your Cause (shortener: bit.ly/12steps-flyer — PDF)

A presentation to get the ball rolling

The presentation was intended not as a comprehensive survey of social media tools or strategies, but as a way to introduce concepts that can be plumbed more deeply in the weeks ahead. In the main, it consisted of three main parts:

• Case studies — successful cause campaigns by Equality California, Tweet for a Cure, Grassroots Mapping, charity:water, Greenpeace, Egypt’s Women & Memory Forum and Nawaa, a group of political activists in Tunisia. (What they did with Google Earth blew me away!)

• 12 steps to activate your supporters, starting with listening and ending with real-world events.

• Tools and action hubs for social change, including Google Earth, Creative Commons, Google Sidewiki, widgets, word cloud visualizations and more.

A technical glitch: Any theories?

We spent a half hour before the session began tackling a technical glitch I had never seen in 10 years of presentations: My videos were playing fine in Keynote on my MacBook Pro, but when the image was projected onto the wall, only the QuickTime still image was visible — nothing that “moved” was displayed through the projector during the entire evening. Which threw me for a loop, since my presentations are intensely media-rich. Have you ever seen that before? What do you think could have caused that?

Despite that, it was a great gathering and I hope to be back at the Hub soon! If you’d like a Mobilize Your Cause workshop held at your organization, drop us a line.

Related

• 12 steps to a successful cause campaign (Socialbrite)

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About 50 people — social activists, nonprofit executives, political campaign strategists — turned out for the first Mobilize Your Cause Bootcamp on June 2 to kick off Personal Democracy Forum in New York.

Above is the first part of the presentation on Slideshare: 12 steps to a successful cause campaign (or, if you prefer, advocacy campaign or e-campaign).

While there are other steps that can take your campaign to the next level, these 12 steps are the building blocks you need to get started:

1. First, listen and observe. Engage before the Ask.
2. Set clear goals & define metrics to measure
3. Define a clear theme
4. Frame it with a personal story
5. Create a simple call to action
6. Create a conversation hub for participants
7. Give your campaign social love handles
8. Consider a mobile component
9. Identify & enlist evangelists
10. Create ongoing mini-actions & provide updates
11. Use immediacy: Headlines & deadlines
12. Measure results, reconnect, refine, refresh

The bootcamp — and the Slideshare presentation — flesh out these recommendations in more detail. And we’ve just added a “Mobilize” section of Socialbrite to pull together the most relevant resources and pointers.

We’ve already had a couple of inquiries about holding another day-long Mobilize Your Cause Bootcamp. If you’re interested, let’s discuss.

Here are about 70 Flickr photos I took of the bootcamp and the rest of the conference. While I focused on social media strategies and tools, Katrin Verclas, Nicola Wells and Rachel LaBruyere provided a look at using mobile in your campaign.

The post 12 steps to a successful cause campaign appeared first on Socialbrite.

Marketing for charitable causes from JD Lasica on Vimeo.

The smartest guy I know in the cause marketing space is Chris Noble, CEO of 8-year-old Kompolt. With the help of a grant from eBay, Chris’s team at Kompolt is organizing the nonprofit track Thursday at BlogWorld Expo in Las Vegas.

Some $6 billion was raised online in 2008 for charity and nonprofits — less than 5 percent of total US charitable giving. Chris thinks we’ll see that trend follow the same growth curve as ecommerce over the next 10 years, and as it does, cause marketing and cause campaigns will play an increasingly important role.

In this 13-minute video interview, Chris talks about the rapidly evolving field of cause marketing — working with companies to promote a social good. Major brands have begun backing charitable causes, and celebrities have as well. Now social media, and participation by online communities, is throwing an extra dimension into the mix.

Watch, embed or download the video on Vimeo. Some highlights:

• The first cause marketing campaign was by American Express in 1980s. A penny of each transaction was donated to renovating the Statue of Liberty.

• Social media is the latest wrinkle in cause marketing, enabling users to have a higher level of direct engagement with a brand.

• Wal-mart and its 11 Moms campaign, where Wal-mart reached out to 11 mommy bloggers, is is just one example of where companies are giving back to the community.

• During Valentine’s Day 2009 Kompolt ran an engagement campaign for Electrolux, the appliance manufacturerer, which wanted to highlight its new baking products. They ran a virtual bake sale on Faceboook, and for every cupcake sent to a friend, Electrolux donated gave $1 to ovarian cancer research. Kompolt sent out close to 200,000 cupcakes during the week and the Electrolux website got 40,000 new registrations.

• Chris cites examples of celebrities such as Carroll Shelby, creator-designer of the Ford Mustang, rallying people around a cause. Kompolt ran a campaign for Restoration Hardware around the 1967 Shelby Cobra and the branded page drew 700,000 unique visits over 10 days. Shelby’s charity supports organ donations for children.

“We see the nexus of celebrity and charity as one that’s only going to grow from here on,” he says. “A lot of under-50 celebs have grown up in a culture of giving back, and it’s very much a part of Hollywood culture now. … It’s not about celebrity but it is about community.”

As Causeitsmybirthday.com demonstrated this past week, anybody can now get online and rally friends and supporters around a cause, raising hundreds or thousands of dollars for a single charity. “That’s incredible,” Chris says.

What’s enabling this is social media. “It allows all of us to run our own little door-to-door campaigns inside our own social networks,” he says.

The post Cause marketing with celebrities, social media appeared first on Socialbrite.

I was supposed to lead a workshop at the Cause Marketing Forum on Social Media and Cause Marketing at the end of May. I was looking forward to it because Michael Hoffman at C3 was a sponsor and participating. Unfortunately, I had to cancel and asked Scott Henderson if he’d do on my behalf.

I met Scott online over a conversation in the comments when I wrote some reflections about David Armano’s personal fundraising campaign back in January. I also participated in a campaign he organized for Share Our Strength.

I decided to do an interview with Scott to learn more about what he is learning about social media and cause-related marketing.

Who are you?

I am a cause marketing director for MediaSauce, helping non-profits and corporations use online media to pull off their next big thing.

Tell us about the “Pledge to End Hunger” you recently launched to benefit Share Our Strength

Goals
The main goals were to raise awareness of childhood hunger in America, give people the tools to take meaningful action to help end this solvable problem, and create a case study from which non-profits and corporations could learn how to better use social media in their cause marketing.

Audience
Our primary audience was more of a profile than a group. We were seeking to find individuals who cared about the cause and would be willing to rally their respective communities (social media and in-person) to take action. Working from that profile we identified four categories:
1) Active Twitterati and bloggers from different niches
2) SXSWi attendees & ambient attendees (those following from home)
3) Individuals in the email databases of the corporations & non-profits leading the campaign, and
4) Wild cards – people separated from us by 2-3 relationship degrees who fit the profile

Strategy
We chose to center the campaign around the 2009 South by Southwest Interactive Festival (SXSWi ’09). It’s an environment that attracts some of the most connected people in a wide variety of industries, creating a unique opportunity for ideas to take root in wider audiences. (Twitter found that out in 2007.) We knew there would be much anticipation and conversation about SXSW in the weeks leading up to it and believed a cause initiative could generate momentum from it.

We started by assembling a team of individuals and companies to serve as our leadership team. We wanted this campaign to focus on the issue of childhood hunger in America and the fact that many different organizations and people were coming together to take up the cause locally and nationally.

The online strategy called for a standalone website to serve as the campaign’s main hub and social media accounts on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube to help create traffic. To help us launch the campaign, we enlisted the help of two respected social media industry professionals to co-chair the campaign and organized about 50 individuals from a cross section of industries and niches that were actively engaged on Twitter and blogging to serve as champions. We also utilized limited email sends from Kimball Office, MediaSauce, Kompolt, Capital Area Food Bank, and Share Our Strength to their respective databases.

Our plan was to drive traffic to the website and provide a clear, easy path of action for those who visited and felt compelled to help. We made it so it didn’t cost money for person to be a philanthropist. An individual “contributed” 35 lbs of Tyson food just by signing an online pledge to take a meaningful action to help end childhood hunger in America. If 1,000 people signed the Pledge, Tyson committed to deliver a semi-truck of food to the Capital Area Food Bank during SXSWi.

People signing the Pledge had three options to act – give, volunteer, and/or share the message – and the website provided ways to fulfill each action right then and there. It had a link to the Share Our Strength online giving form, another to a zip code search tool to find local food agencies to volunteer, and multiple tools for sharing the message – including a widget that showed the current tally of the Pledge to End Hunger. We placed the emphasis on asking people to share our message, since that would invariably lead to more people to see our message, thus increasing the number of people donating and volunteering.

Knowing this campaign could get serious traction and blow past its initial goal, we planned for a Phase II. With Tyson Foods willing to donate up to three more trucks, we decided to direct those trucks to the states which generated the highest number of people to sign the pledge. To help fuel this state-vs.-state competition, we built the map on the website to show the number of pledges from each state and altered the message the pledge tally counter to include the top five states in order of their real-time tallies.

Metrics for success
Primary: # of people signing the pledge.
Secondary: $ raised for Share Our Strength.
Leading indicators: Unique site visitors, Tr.im url click-thrus, Facebook cause members, YouTube videos viewed, #HungerPledge usage, and SXSWi podium mentions.

Results
With the help of the HungerPledge Champions and email sends, we launched the campaign on Thursday, March 5, which turned to be our single largest day of traffic. In the first 28 hours, we reached 1,000 people signing the pledge. By the final deadline of March 20, we had about 4,600 people sign the pledge. In total, we raised $28,000 from 714 people for Share Our Strength – with around 95% of them being first-time donors. Over 19,000 visitors came to the website over the first 21 days and we welcomed 2,600 people to our Facebook Cause group.

The story that we think best characterizes the campaign is the one about Michele Helsel. Michele took it upon herself to spearhead Missouri’s second-place finish. She devoted her energies to the campaign for two reasons: her company (Kimball Office) was one of the sponsors and, more importantly, her parents are long-time volunteers at a food pantry in St. Charles, Mo. When we announced that the extra trucks would go to the states with the highest pledge totals, she set the goal of placing in the top three and getting a truck for her state.

For two weeks, she leveraged every single phone number and email she had to get the word out. Interestingly, she didn’t use Twitter, Facebook, or other social media. Just old fashioned phone calls and emails. She reached to her church, her family’s Elks Lodge, her husband’s Harley Davidson club, her parents’ contacts, the local food pantry, and all her customers and distributors (she’s the St. Louis sales manager for Kimball Office). With one week left in the pledge tally deadline, Missouri was barely in the top ten. By the end, the Show Me State was comfortably in second with 509 people signing the pledge. And it was all because one person realized they could help the community and had all the tools at her disposal to rally her community.

What are the keys to success?

The most critical key to successful cause marketing is that the cause must come before the marketing. Too often, we see corporations (and even non-profits) put their brands and products/services before or side-by-side with the cause. People are constantly searching for authenticity and will shun those they think are being opportunistic. If you don’t give the spotlight to the cause or give little emphasis to solving the problem, they’ll discount your campaign right away. It’s very similar to life – we tend to admire those people who do good in humble ways.

In terms of online and social media, the main principles are:
1. tell a clear, compelling story,
2. give people clear, simple action steps,
3. make it easy for people to share your story/join your cause,
4. show real-time results to give immediate gratification,
5. be prepared to converse and respond to people with little delay, and
6. realize not everyone is going to care.

If you plan to conduct a campaign (which I hope you do), be sure to devote resources and energy to illustrate the impact your campaign makes. Too many organizations conduct drive-thru philanthropy and don’t spend the resources on showing the results of what was achieved. We’re still posting content on www.pledgetoendhunger.com about the four food banks receiving the trucks.

What would you do differently next time?

From a website design perspective, we would have made a non-flash mobile version of the website. Using flash for the pledge form hindered us with anyone who came to the website on their iPhone (no flash player).

In terms of the overall campaign, we would have placed a greater emphasis on sending a series of emails to existing databases, especially to those who signed the pledge. These databases represent people who already have an existing relationship with an organization and will be more likely to help than a brand, new person. In addition to using our email databases more, we would have put a greater effort on assembling a coalition of local hunger relief agencies. Those organizations who joined the campaign midstream did deliver results and were the ones who stood the most to gain.

From a social media perspective, we would have used Facebook differently. The decision to create a Facebook Cause group was almost an afterthought for us, since we were more focused on Twitter. Simple arithmetic can show that Facebook has a significantly larger audience potential. Even barely cultivating the Facebook Cause, the membership grew pretty much organically to the 2,600 person total. While some have questioned the value of Facebook Cause, we think it has great value in creating awareness thru peoples’ existing relationship networks. Since we didn’t have the donation button activated, we can’t comment on how many direct contributions came from that group.

How are social media and cause marketing changing the nonprofit world?

Both are being impacted just like everything else. Social media make it very easy for the 1 billion who own personal computers and 3.3 billion who own cell phone to connect, communicate, and collaborate in ways not possible before. People now have greater expectations of intimacy and immediacy with other people and organizations. Further, they realize that change can happen with a much faster velocity and are no longer satisfied with incremental change. At the same time, organizations have to compete harder to gain people’s attention, which is being splintered by the seemingly infinite number of screens saturating us with media.

Non-profits for the most part have been accustomed to relying on their magazines and direct appeals to be their main connections to their supporters. They’ve mostly been able to set the schedule for communications and have often defaulted to the annual solicitation as their lifeline. Now that we’re no longer bound by broadcast messaging, non-profits are scrambling to shift their personnel and financial resources to more two-way communications. It’s no longer enough to have a static website, e-newsletters, and email solicitations. The most prevalent trend for non-profits is that they want to stop experimenting and get a sustainable strategy for integrating online media into their entire communications and fundraising operations.

In terms of cause-marketing, social media make it much easier launch these initiatives. We expect to see even more cause-marketing plays using social media – for better or for worse. It makes sense, since corporations are experiencing the same higher expectations for intimacy and immediacy. Consumers want to know that the businesses they patronize are doing something for the greater community, not just for themselves.

Because we’ll see a greater number of cause-marketing initiatives, we can also expect a greater number of failures. We’ll also see a greater number of successes. People’s expectations for the quality and originality of these campaigns will grow. It won’t be enough for companies & non-profits to launch these campaigns using strategies and tactics already used. We will also see a higher bar set for the results that need to be achieved. It won’t be enough to raise dollars and generate traffic for surface issues. People will expect to see these campaigns solve the root problems and change the social dynamics causing the problem in the first place.

I am excited about what the coming months and years will bring. I think we’re in the early stages of a complete reorganization of how we work together to solve social problems. Self-organized swarms of individuals will have equal footing with the non-profits and corporations. These self-organized swarms won’t be satisfied to wait for non-profits and corporations to lead. They will take the initiative like they did with Twestival to rally around a cause and raise money and awareness with little involvement from the non-profit. They will also begin to create more media properties like www.pledgetoendhunger.com that promote the broader cause and bring various international, national, regional, and local non-profits and corporations together to create systemic change, not just local change. Savvy non-profits and corporations will realize this and adapt accordingly.

This post originally appeared on Beth’s Blog.

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