Following is a guest post from my cohort, Scott Henderson, who is the cause marketing director at MediaSauce, an Internet strategy company. You can learn more about him at Rally the Cause, his personal media platform.
#1 Thing to Learn from this Post:
When combined, online media and cause marketing offer you new opportunities to engage your current supporters and reach a much wider circle of new supporters.
A More Detailed Exploration:
On their own, online media and cause marketing can help you grow your organization. As this soon-to-be-released case study will demonstrate, bringing social media and cause marketing together in an innovative way can be a powerful way to drive greater engagement and attract new waves of champions.
From its conception, the Pledge to End Hunger was designed to help identify the key principles for how non-profits and corporations can best use online media to drive their cause marketing campaigns. While it was not intended to be the largest, it was the first launched to generate significant behavioral data and test certain hypotheses.
A Sneak Peak at the Elements of Success
From the analysis of this data, we have created a road map based on actual experience. As you will see from our findings, your success in combining online media and cause marketing will come from six elements of success. Here’s a sneak peak at two of them:
- Free Philanthropy Creates Real Philanthropy
- Embrace the Self-Organized Swarms
But, First, a Quick Summary
On March 5, 2009, MediaSauce brought together resources from Tyson Foods, Share Our Strength, and The Capitol Area Food Bank of Texas to launch an awareness-driving campaign in conjunction with the South By Southwest Festival in Austin, Texas.
The most significant difference from typical campaign management was that the campaign was operated and executed almost exclusively using online tools (primarily Twitter, Facebook, and email) to drive awareness to a central “action hub” found at www.pledgetoendhunger.com where guests could choose to make a donation, locate a volunteer opportunity nearby, and/or share the message through a variety of downloadable tools.
By the close of SXSW, we surpassed all of our initial goals:
- Goal of 1,000 people signing the Pledge: 4,800 actual
- The first 1,000 came within the first 28 hours
- Triggered the donation of four semi-trucks full of high-protein food product from Tyson Food, totaling more than 560,000 servings
- Although not intended to be a fundraising campaign, 714 signers of the pledge used the site to donate more than $28,000 to Share Our Strength as a direct result of the campaign.
- Of those who donated, 95% of them were first-time donors and the largest donor gave $2,500.
Free Philanthropy Creates Real Philanthropy
People like to give other people’s stuff away and this campaign helped them do so at little or no incremental cost using online media.
Anyone could feel like a philanthropist without having to donate his or her own resources. It cost just 30-60 seconds of time to fill out the pledge form and trigger a 35 lb gift of product from Tyson Foods. In comparison, the same person would have had to pay about $100 if they were to buy that same amount and donate it in-kind to a food bank (or many times more if they were to purchase the food themselves).
The main call to action of the campaign was for people to share the message with others. While donating and volunteering were available options, they were not stressed. Despite this imbalance of messaging, 999 of the 4,699 (21%) who signed the pledge committed to donate money to a hunger relief organization.
Of these, 714 gave directly to Share Our Strength thru pledgetoendhunger.com with 95% of them being first-time donors. Over $28,000 was raised benefitting Share Our Strength with the largest gift of $2,500 coming from a first-time donor.
These results demonstrate that non-profit organizations can generate real donations and attract new donors through cause marketing campaigns that focus on education and developing personal connections. When an individual makes the leap to a “participant” who has committed to a cause, they will act accordingly.
Embrace the Self-Organized Swarms
Prepare, embrace, and equip the self-organized swarms of people who are attracted to the cause and willing to champion it. The pledgetoendhunger.com website was built as a platform to anyone who came across the message with all the tools they needed to rally their community.
One swarm, 12for12k.org, joined the cause on their own accord and raised $15,515 from 444 people, which represented 55% of all dollars raised and 67% of all donors who gave. Another swarm, led by a woman in St. Louis using only email and phone calls, inspired 509 people to sign the pledge. That was 10.8% of all pledges and enough to put Missouri into second place of all states.
Though both group used their own established communication channels within their circle of influence, the central website was crucial as the anchor point that their impressive efforts directed their people towards in order to heed their personal requests and take action.
So What Do You Think?
Are online media and cause marketing the future of engagement?
