As you know, the U.S. has been experiencing severe tornadoes and weather in the Midwest over the past 2 weeks, and now many of the rivers (most notably the Mississippi) are at 'flood stage', and the water is still rising. The American Red Cross is always one of the organizations that comes to the aid of people in need of disaster relief... and so me, my martial arts instructor, and his sponsors are coming together to try and raise both awareness and money to help the Red Cross in their efforts on the ground, in the Mid-west and Japan.
My instructor has over 20,000 followers on twitter, and another 15-20k on Facebook... and we have some sponsors willing to throw in prizes... so this is what I came up with in terms of a plan: we are going to have a Twitter Sweepstakes, which we will promote on our blog, on a Facebook Event Page, and various twitter accounts. The top 30 winners will win anything from a t-shirt, up to a grand prize package of martial arts oriented prizes worth around $500.
To enter the contest, entrants must:
1.) follow @redcross, the official page of the American Red Cross on Twitter. Since everyone is already aware of the disasters, I wanted to take awareness to the next level, by opening a new realtime channel connecting @redcross to users that will KEEP them aware of different needs in an ongoing manner.
2.) donate $10 directly to the Red Cross relief efforts by texting 'REDCROSS' to 90999 on their mobile phones. Awareness is good, but at this point cold hard cash is better. The issue is we didn't want to actually collect money on behalf of the non-profit, because it entails a lot of paperwork and it opens up the possibility of fraud (or the perception of potential for fraud) so I wanted the money to go directly from the donor to the organization, without us touching it. And once a donor contributes by SMS, they are given the option to get a receipt for their tax deductible donation. A policy of 'no receipt, no prize' ensures people will donate without the need for me to come up with a way 30,000+ complied with the rule.... I just need to check 30 at the very end before we send them their prize.
3.) Once the contestant follows the @redcross page and donates via SMS, they then have to post on their twitter profile: "I donated $10 to @redcross and follow them, and told my martial arts friends 2go2 http://XXXX.com/martial-arts-disaster-relief" The idea here is simply that the third party software company that is handling the actual pooling and selecting of contestants, will search for this unique phrase across twitter and automatically check to see if the user who posted this phrase actually is following @redcross. If they did, we will assume they donated and just add them to the pool of contestants, without requiring them to send us anything by email, etc. And at the end, we manually check just the 30 winners for compliance, not everyone, which is slight friction.
The tweet is also critical in spreading the word, obviously, as well. I chose to make it a statement, because I thought it was more powerful, it addressed the awareness issue, it included the donation statement, and it had the keyword jiu-jitsu in it to make sure it was directed at our target audience. By the same token, I avoided keywords like 'contest' and 'sweepstakes' to avoid random people just trying to win free crap. The link in the tweet will go directly to the 3rd party contest page, and that, in turn, will link to our blog page for the full story. A Facebook event page linked to the contest page will also help us both promote the event, as well as announce the winners, in such a way that it doesn't violate FB's TOS, yet it still allows us to leverage our fan base there.
After looking at several companies to host the event (because I think it's important to ensure the drawing is done fairly, in accordance with best practices, and the winners are truly chosen at random) I chose tweetswin.com. And Jeremy, the owner, is waived a $100 customization fee for me since this is going to a good cause.
Anyway, I think this is notable from a marketing standpoint because so far I haven't seen anyone do anything like this, in that the organization being promoted isn't even involved in the contest, and yet we were able to work around this in such a way that it doesn't violate any of their rules, and it's done so that there is no room for fraud, since it uses their existing technology. (I also confirmed compliance with Gloria Huang, Social Media Specialist at the RedCross, who said we dont have to fill out any forms because our organization doesn't touch the money.)
We already secured the prizes, and we should be able to wrap this whole thing up in under 2 weeks. I'm looking forward to see if we can really move the needle.
looks good Dogboy - it nicely avoids the 'benefiting from disaster' accusation that often gets made (occasionally rightly!) about charity promo's as well.
I'll be really interested to know how you find Tweetswin. That could be very useful.
>Tweetswin. [...] That could be very useful.
http://wildfireapp.com/ , http://random.org and http://onekontest.com/ were other candidates. Ultimately it came back to Justin being able to tweak his software to meet our needs, and then not charging me to do it:)
>it nicely avoids the 'benefiting from disaster' accusation
Thank you, I thought so too:) By keeping the contest on tweetswin (and just promoting it from our blog, FB page, and twitter) we were able to squarely address the neutrality of the drawing... and by using mgive.org's SMS technology, we were able to connect wireless users directly to an existing and easily verifiable and secure payment method... which addresses concerns at multiple levels.
...another cool feature about this style of donation is that the user can specify whether they want to donate to the tsunami victims or the more recent domestic disasters.
Anyone with ideas on how we could monitor success using additional 3rd party software?
The contest is already being tracked, so I got my finger on the trigger and if I do nothing it will auto post publicly at 6am PST tomorrow.
Last little finishing touches are getting done:)
I sent out the word to some of the guys... we launch it at 6PST:)
ok, I pulled the trigger this morning by posting that image on my instructor's Facebook page and tagging a bunch of people, which is a low friction way of moving traffic from people's new streams, off-site. (The @Name trick doesn't always work on mobile.) It's definitely an eye catcher with the red and white thumbnail.
...this is what I live for:) Watching stuff go viral and seeing what happens. But exponential growth is so slow at first, you don't really know if what you set in motion will actually build in momentum or die quickly. My hope is we have enough to get it over the hump. The idea was to make enough noise that the martial arts reporters would get wind of what was going on and shift us into high gear for the last push down the straight away right before the finish line.
Good stuff Rob and cudos for taking action.
Thanks, Ras:) Anything is better than nothing, right?
So far the reaction in the martial arts community has been fair. The problem seems that we just aren't getting retweets like we thought. No one seems to care too much, but we are only 48 hours into it. Last time when we did the food drive we had nothing right up until the day before it was over then we got 95% of what we collected. Plus it will take a few days to get the bloggers to talk about it and I'm counting on them to some extent.
Also, the martial arts community is really just a bunch of factions that are always fighting each other... literally. So getting T-shirts from your competition isn't an ideal prize for some guys. So, unfortunately, politics plays a role in the movement of information here, as well.
And obviously, it's always easier to get people to retweet than it is to get them to donate $10:) That's why I wanted to make sure 'donation' was one of the conditions of entry, even though it is high friction. In the end, you need to raise some money, not just make more noise.
As far as the 'follow and retweet' style sweepstakes, that isn't new... just txting donations on your phone component is. So I don't think the overall concept is odd, ASSUMING you are a fan of Twitter and know how it works.
As far as what to do while I still have time, I'm up for ideas. The first thing I did do was cut out some text and re-arrange all the important copy up to the top of the page, so it could be better digested.
...I think it's much better, but you tell me what you think. I will say that it is one of those WordPress themes that doesn't allow for too much of anything, including 'fine print', but I don't think it's the page's fault, at least at this point, anymore.
I will say, it seems almost useless to promote it on Facebook, although I am considering making an 'Event' for this benefit, just so I can do what I can. (I have no followers on Twitter at all, so if Pablo can't get through to them, there seems to be little I can do, besides thank the people who donated (using keywords) so that I give their 'act' a little more life, and the 'cause' a little more exposure.
If the prizes weren't so 'fight' oriented, you could take it more mainstream, but since it's pretty targeted, I think we need to keep it focused in this space. And honestly, I think we need to focus on the prizes more, to get people more involved. And from what I can see, I don't think the sponsors are helping to promote the event at all either. Not even sure they have twitter accounts.
Anyway, any constructive thoughts on how to help maximize our efforts are still welcome.
I wonder if it might be worth rewriting the entry instructions to be very VERY simple.....
FOLLOW - go to http://twitter.com/#!/redcross and click follow
DONATE - text REDCROSS to 90999 to donate $10 to the red cross
TWEET - copy this text and tweet it - your message must say exactly this;
elaborate below if you need/want - but at the moment they actually have to want to read stuff to enter!
done. thx. (I did have to leave one clause about doing step 3 last.... because they have to do it in that order or they wont be counted accurately.) Anything else jumping out at you?
Oh, I decided to make an event page on Facebook for the hell of it. Hoping people might pass it around on FB and we'll have some overlap.
sorry, that was very much post and run earlier! I can't see anything else which stands out as something to test - I honestly don't believe there's a guaranteed social media formula, whatever some of our *ahem* esteemed colleagues may say, so its a case of cross your fingers and hope it takes off now I guess, you seem to have covered all the bases.
Only other *possible* things I can think of;
Some type of target - eg; aim to raise $1000 and show a gauge to see how close the campaign's getting - although I'm never sure if stuff like that works when you're a long way off.
Tweet the thanks as Pablo, rather than having him retweet them. May make a difference to how people read things.
Get him to tweetpix pics of the prizes - that lot would look impressive all piled up together I guess
Can you get the redcross to retweet it somehow? Might be tricky but would be a new but interested audience and a % of them would surely like martial arts?
try sticking it on competition sites - since there's effectively an entrance fee I don't know how well it'd work, but every time our comps (accidentally) end up on moneysavingexpert and similar we get shitloads of entries, although I hate to see the prize going to someone who's clearly not an actual customer.....it might help to get the volume of tweets up to get the word out there.
Totally appreciated, Gurtie, thank you.
At the rate we are going I think we will end up ok, but it all depends on how people respond as the sweepstakes period comes to a close. I hope there is a flurry of activity. When we did a soup drive at the school, everyone waited until the last second, so maybe the same thing will happen here:)
well it wasn't the turn out I had hoped for :(
These are the things that I'll take away from this, in no particular order, or magnitude...
- twitter is a better place to point out an event to your friends, not necessarily be the venue of the event.
- Even after I cut down the page, I think it was a little long. But I also think any copy over 140 characters wont be read by twitter traffic. By definition they LIKE short text only. So something that has rules, etc. is at one end of the spectrum, and they are at the other = bad match. Bloggers would like this type of event:)
- despite what you may think, on average, it's really hard to get people to volunteer, or donate $ to worthy causes. And I'm saying that from trying lots of things, not just based on this Sweepstakes. I'd like to think its because people always think someone else will do something, not because they don't really care. But getting someone to pull out $10 for a donation is tough. In real life, people walk by the donation jar and try not to make eye contact.... its worse online.
- twitter seems like lots of people talking but very few listening. I wonder if that is because so many people link their accounts to twitter, so they post but dont read.
- since the 'Post and Follow' Sweepstakes exists, and several companies offer them, I'm not going to place too much blame on the idea, but attribute the lack of interest to the 'donation' step.