Today is the official launch of To Mama With Love, a collaborative online art project that honors moms across the globe and raises funds to invest in remarkable women who are transforming our world. To Mama With Love is an initiative of Epic Change, the folks behind Tweetsgiving. The To Mama With Love event is May 3 – 8, 2011. To Mama With love is…about creating and spreading love.  Participants create socially shareable “heartspaces” that include words, videos, photos & investments in honor of mamas they love. The changemakers are four incredible women who have created schools and shelters for children who face poverty, illiteracy, and lack of opportunity in Nepal, Afghanistan, and Tanzania.

This is a cause I believe in tremendously, and it aligns with my vision of creating a just world of opportunity. My mother was one of the 1970s-era equal rights activists who marched, protested, fought for an equal rights constitutional amendment, attended a world conference on women, and put her money where her mouth was to fund Emily’s List. I’m honoring my mother, Susan Silverman Askanase, in my heartspace.

I’m pledging $50 now, and up to another $50 to match my readers’ Epic Change donations

Epic Change’s goal this year is to raise at least $65,000 to invest in Mama Lucy’s secondary school in Tanzania, Renu & Maggie’s schools in Kathmandu & Surkhet, Nepal, and Suraya’s women’s shelter in Afghanistan. Please leave a comment on this blog post, with a link to your heartspace, so that I can match up to $50 in your donations to Epic Change.

Though I love my mother, and always want to honor her on Mother’s Day:

I participate in To Mama With Love because Epic Change founder Stacey Monk has created one of the most incredible online campaigns in which I’ve ever had the honor of participating

Epic Change, has taken every principle of great community organizing and integrated it into To Mama With Love. Epic Change is also an organization that embodies the culture of social media, which is the culture of inclusion. If you want to run a successful social media fundraising campaign, you can’t do better than to follow their lead:

1. Cultivate a community of stakeholders. Stacey Monk, Epic Change’s founder, is a gardener. She has spent years planting seeds of love and cultivating a community of giving. She cultivates the “magic middle” of stakeholders, activists, and influencers who would genuinely care about a cause such as Epic Change’s.

2. Nurture leaders. This year, Epic Change created a private Facebook Group to discuss the campaign before launch. Stacey invited people into the group that she’s been cultivating for years (and who have shown interest in Epic Change. Then she nurtured them:

• She asked people to introduce themselves within the group
• She asked for volunteers to help with tasks (proofing the press release, developing a Twitter list, inputting a database list, etc.)
• She asked people to invite their friends into the group, and welcomed those friends as they joined
  
• Stacey created questions within the private group to bring out our expertise: a win-win for all

3. Create campaigns with your stakeholders. Stacey consistently asked the group for help refining the campaign. She asked questions such as: should we send the blogger invitations during the weekend or not, should she redesign the home page in a certain way, and when should people tweet? She listened, and followed the group’s consensus.

4. Be transparent and inclusive. Campaign documents are posted for all to view and comment upon. Questions are encouraged, and comments are invited.

5. Design commitment. Before joining the group (or upon joining), we were asked to commit to at least one “mission,” which we committed to through a form. Missions included: invite five others to join the group, commit to writing a blog post, commit to donating money during the campaign, create a heartspace, send emails, and “nudge an influencer.” Stacey sends out mission reminders and asked us to post which missions we completed to the private Facebook Group.

6. Recognize those who are giving. The To Mama With Love website recognizes the bloggers, donors, and the volunteers that helped to plan the event very publicly. This is the very the community that Epic Change has spent the time cultivating.

One other thing: when I volunteered to help out with Epic Change’s Tweetsgiving 2010 campaign, Stacey Monk personally called me at home to thank me the night before the launch. In doing so, she instantly created a more personal, stronger offline connection out of our online connection, strengthening the connection.

When you are involved with Epic Change, you feel honored to be part of her “big circle of love,” because it is such an unique, supportive community of stakeholders. Stacey has created a family you want to be part of, one that supports each other and offers collaboration and encouragement…en route to changing the world.

Thank YOU for creating Epic Change and spreading epic amounts of love.

The Get HandsOn (GHO) campaign, a project of the Points of Light Institute and managed by HandsOn Network, is a three-part interactive service challenge to inspire people to become involved in community service that includes the games Tag, Follow the Leader, and Break the Record. The first challenge, the world’s largest game of virtual Tag, launched in November 2010. Over 7,000 people “tagged” friends to make a commitment to making a difference, and GHO offered donations and prizes for participation.

Follow the Leader, the second GHO challenge, launched in late January.  As with Tag, Follow the Leader (FTL) utilizes social media innovatively. The campaign site includes game dynamics (leaderboards, leader prizes), commenting and tagging (tagging, group project journals with commenting features), and community aspects (members, group projects, project forums). This challenge again leverages real world social ties and virtual ties that, most importantly, move people to action. The results are measurable: projects created (supported videos, photos, written blogs), number of individual commitments to an action, meetups about a project (number of meetups via meetup.com), and service stories (online journal entries). This game, only three weeks old, already has 93  volunteers committed to lead projects. Follow the Leader runs through the end of May.

This is no slacktivism – this is activism

Michael Nealis, Interactive Strategy Coordinator for HandsOn Network, answered my burning questions about Follow the Leader and Tag in the interview below.

How did the idea of the Get HandsOn campaign originate?
HandsOn Network worked with an outside marketing agency to develop the plan for a campaign that harnessed the power of social networks to inspire people to create positive change. We were interested in how online communities and the psychology of gaming and contest behavior might be leveraged for social good. The first phase, Tag, was designed to inspire people through commitments to service.  Follow the Leader is working to equip people with tools that can help put projects into action and make a difference.

What was the goal of Tag, and how is it different than Follow the Leader?
The goal of Tag was to identify service leaders across the nation, either by self-selection or by having a friend or colleague identify them as a service leader.  Tag was a lot more passive than Follow the Leader.

Follow the Leader builds on Tag by asking the people who have been identified as service leaders to lead volunteer projects in their communities. We’re asking a lot more of participants in Follow the Leader.

What did you learn from Tag?
One of the most interesting things that we learned from Tag was who drove the competition.  While there was a large body of participants, a very small group was responsible for almost a quarter of the activity during the campaign.  Service leaders engaged online in ways that were consistent with more general statistics about online behavior. We also learned that people don’t often self identify as service leaders even though they regularly exhibit all the behaviors we associate with one.

What is the primary focus of Follow the Leader? What are the primary goals?
From a player’s point of view, the goal is to be able to plug in to a community of people that are dedicated to service in order to support the individual’s own service.  There are also game aspects, including a prize structure including grants for players’ favorite charities and trips to Washington, DC, New Orleans, and Atlanta. We’ve also provided project playbooks, which are “how-to guides” for easy to implement, volunteer projects that anyone can organize.

The end result of FTL will be to increase and mobilize the number of Americans involved in volunteer service, to identify and connect with volunteer leaders within their communities, and to help those who want to get involved in volunteering implement impactful projects in their neighborhoods. We’re looking to channel the energy and excitement from Martin Luther King, Jr. Day into a longer term commitment to service.  We hope to bridge the gap between a one-day commitment to service and a more sustained commitment to service.

There are a lot of elements of social media throughout Follow the Leader—can you highlight a few?  What are you most excited about and why?
There are a lot of ways Follow the Leader incorporates social media: sharing commitments to service on Facebook and Twitter, community forums where people can share their commitments to service and get feedback from the community, and space for users to blog about their service commitments and include photos and video from their projects.

We’re most excited about the members’ journals.  We’re only three weeks into Follow the Leader, and we have some really great stories about people’s commitment to service—from initial planning steps to one person’s story about a nation-wide service vacation. We really love reading the different stories about how people are making service a part of their lives.

What is HandsOn Network trying to learn from Follow the Leader?
We’re hoping to learn more about how service leaders engage with one another and how we might be as helpful as possible in supporting their efforts.

What is the expected participation of Follow the Leader?
We don’t have a target number for participation in Follow the Leader, but we do have an expectation of what participation means.  We hope that people will make a service commitment, download one of the Project Playbooks to guide their own service projects, then share their photos, videos, and experience with their service projects.  We hope that by sharing their experience, others will be inspired not just to serve, but to lead others in service themselves.

How will you follow-up from Follow the Leader?
We’re having fun with the playful nature of the games and are looking to further explore inspiring service activity using the theme of games.  Additionally, we’re looking towards Tag version 2.0.  We’ll take the lessons learned from the overall Get HandsOn campaign and we’ll be using them to make a stronger support structure for individual-driven community service. Long term, we’d love Get HandsOn to result in a vibrant online community where service leaders exchange ideas and inspire each other to change the world.

Michael Nealis is the Interactive Strategy Coordinator for Get HandsOn.

He can be reached on twitter @MikeNealis.

Epic Change is one woman’s quest to change the world permanently…through gratitude. Stacey Monk is a changemaker, a fountain of gratitude, and an incredible connector. She founded Epic Change in 2007 to amplify the voices of grassroots changemakers and social entrepreneurs. Since then, Epic Change has been raising money through gratitude, one tweet at a time.

She did it all through the lens of gratitude. In 2008, Epic Change created Tweetsgiving, ecouraging the Twitterati to tweet what they are grateful for, and connect that to a donation for as little as $10 to build a boarding school in Tanzania. That raised $11,000 in 48 hours. Tweetsgiving 2009 raised $30,000 from 657 donors. This past Mother’s Day, Epic Change’s collaborative artspace, To Mama With Love, raised $16,000 from 329 online, spurred on by twitterers, bloggers, and facebook users.

Tweetsgiving 2010 is called Epic Thanks. The campaign utilizes gratitude cards, online evangelists, and community organizing.

Epic Thanks is also one of the great online fundraising campaigns of 2010.

Epic Thanks is a worldwide celebration of gratitude that began November 23. The idea is so simple it’s incredible: bring the thankfulness back to Thanksgiving. Show the gratitude in our hearts, share it, and transform the world. This Tweetsgiving, Epic Change has selected three changemaker organizations to recieve the donations: Mama Lucy’s school in Tanzania, Subhash Ghimire’s Peace School in Nepal, and Mike Halley’s Halley’s K-9s for Veterans.

You only have to visit www.epicthanks.org to see gratitude on display. This campaign site makes you smile, and it’s easy to express  gratitude on the site. Who doesn’t want to donate out of gratitude?

I personally love the Gratitude Cards. They are fun, beautifully designed, easily shareable, and a great donation incentive. Stacey explains: “This year, when you create one of these postcards on the site, you’ll be asked to give before you send the postcard. People can give from $10 to ‘a gajillion dollars.’ If someone wants to give a gajillion dollars, then we’ll figure out how to do that.”

Stacey tells me:

“In my dream world 10,000 people will create postcards and post them.”

To understand the mechanics of how Stacey Monk, Sanjay Patel and the incredible Epic Change volunteer team made this happen, you only have to understand Stacey:  that intersection of intention, determination, gratefulness, and community.

Early on, the Epic Change team reached out to almost 100 supporters personally, asking them to host a local Epic Thanks fundraiser, and/or become an online campaign evangelist. Every volunteer committed to completing at least one Epic Thanks activity, such as donating money, asking five friends to donate, writing blog posts, etc. (Disclosure – I completed the form and one of the things I agreed to do was write a blog post about Epic Thanks. Another was to donate.)

Volunteers were invited into a closed discussion group. Stacey got the group rolling by asking us to introduce ourselves and talk about what we are grateful for. As the event date grew nearer, we discussed what we are each doing to promote the event, encourage donations. Stacey is our cheerleader. Bringing supporters into the planning and implementation jump-started this year’s Epic Thanks right out of the door with abundant tweets and gratitude cards. That’s community organizing at its best.

Last year, I was also invited to participate in the online volunteer group, and I was curious what is different about this year’s group. Stacey answers:

“Our planning group this year is much bigger than previously and more geographically dispersed. We wanted people who are heartfully-connected rather than people who would lend us their name. Intention makes a powerful difference. Influencers are bombarded by a million different requests and don’t have the opportunity to get deeply connected to something that they are personally sharing. ” And that’s what this group really is – everyone is incredibly generous, and heartfully-connected to Epic Change.

As I write this, 118 grateful souls have invested $5,876 in the dreams of three incredible changemakers. Thus far #EpicThanks has been tweeted 1,483 times! Stacey Monk’s fundraising goal is $1 million. Let’s tweet gratitude and re-tweet it often.

Intention makes a powerful difference

I hope you’ll participate in Epic Thanks in one way or another, and donate. I have.

If there were an award for the most courageous, determined social media experimenter around, Manny Hernandez would win, hands down. He is also one of the busiest people I know. Manny founded and manages the Diabetes Hands Foundation (DHF), a nonprofit organization that connects people touched by diabetes and raises diabetes awareness.

The Diabetes Hands Foundation is among the rock stars of social media – it is nimble, experimental, and not afraid to fail. Mostly, they succeed - big time.

Manny, along with thousands of volunteers, has built DHF into an incredible community of care and activism around diabetes. All of their activities create community, and the organization keeps that at the forefront of every new initiative. It is truly a community-based organization.

The community primarily lives in its two active, successful (Ning-based) online communities for people with diabetes: TuDiabetes.org (English) with 17,450 members and EsTuDiabetes.org (Spanish) with 11,200 members. The strong community gives DHF the strength to be able to experiment with new tools and develop new applications. DHF developed an application called TuAnalyze, in which members of the TuDiabetes diabetes social network track, share and compare their diabetes data. DHF also co-developed and launched (in collaboration with the Joslin Diabetes Center) HealthSeeker, a Facebook game to help people with diabetes develop healthy lifestyle eating habits. Since its launch in June, HealthSeeker has grown to 1,553 monthly active users. Right after launching HealthSeeker, DHF published No Sugar Added in July, a collection of poetry entirely crowdsourced, with the theme of living with diabetes. You can read Manny’s guest post about how he developed No Sure Added here.

Now comes Big Blue Test: test your blood sugar level, exercise for 14 minutes, test yourself again.

Just in time for World Diabetes Day on November 14th, DHF is publicizing its Big Blue Test in a big way. DHF learned from last year’s campaign and it is entirely reconceived. Last year, DHF asked people to create their own landing pages and online spaces to discuss the Big Blue Test. “The range of implementations was too broad. It was complicated to analyze the data and it did not give the feeling of community,” says Manny. This year Big Blue Test looks and feels entirely different.

From the beginning, this year’s Big Blue Test was a collaborative project. Manny explains, “around the time we were brainstorming about this year’s Big Blue Test, diabetes advocate Riva Greenberg sent me and Roche a viral video and suggested a video collaboration between us and Roche. That inspired me to create a video that could really get some traction and go viral.” Roche supported and partnered with DHF in the development of all aspects of Big Blue Test. “Roche really gave us the creative freedom to develop this project, and Roche USA championed the idea of sponsoring the video and the Big Blue Test video donation challenge.” says Manny. The result is the video at the top of this page publicizing the Big Blue Test and a donation challenge.

DHF wanted to create a video sharing incentive, and also people to feel good about the incentive and have a short-term, measurable impact.DHF teamed up with Roche, Life for A Child, and Insulin for Life to create short-term impact:  For every view up to 100,000 views, Roche will donate $0.75, a cap of $75,000 to help children with diabetes in developing countries. The donation will be divided between Life For A Child (of the International Diabetes Federation) and Insulin for Life. Both organizations focuse on giving insulin and diabetes supplies to children in developing countries.

The video went live October 31st in English, Spanish, Portuguese, German, and French, all translated by volunteers. To date, it has 83,801 views. To gain exposure, DHF reached out to influential twitter users and bloggers in the diabetes and nonprofit communities. “Most of the bloggers and twitter uses we reached out to either tweeted about it or blogged about it,” says Manny. The most effective means in getting it out has been through Twitter. They are tracking the hashtag #bigbluetest. In the past two weeks it has been tweeted about 3,500 times with that hashtag.

From the YouTube page, the call to action within the video of watching it and passing it along has been effective. To date, the largest sharing group is  35+ and female, and the top viewing countries are the US, Brazil, Canada, and Australia.  56% of the views are on YouTube itself, and 37% are views embedded on another website.

What has not worked at all?  “Asking celebrities to retweet it. That was a wrong assumption on my part.” Manny sent @messages to many celebrities asking if they would retweet the message and none of them has done so yet.

DHF also took advantage of the Ning platform to publicize the video challenge and test. Ning offers “takeover” functionality to change their Ning homepage. DHF essentially replaced the home pages of TuDiabetes.or and EsTuDiabetes.org with the Big Blue Test page. Members have to view this new homepage in order to enter the site. About 5% of all the video views come in this way.

I asked Manny what has been the most surprising part of the campaign. “The generosity has been just unbelievable. People watch it often. People take the time to watch it several times and tell others to do the same. The same thing on Twitter – several people have tweeted and re-tweeted it hundreds of times. Some have incorporated the #bigbluetest into every tweet. We haven’t seen yet the power of the influencers to generate a high number of video views, however. What we have seen is the power of the community pulling their weight behind this effort to do so.”

Manny sums up the success of the video challenge and the Big Blue Test to date:

“Believe the commitment of the people that are part of your community.”

That’s the secret behind the success of the Diabetes Hands Foundation as well.

Please watch the Big Blue Test video at the top of this page. Every view means a donation of diabetes products to children in developing countries. I also bet you won’t be able to get the catchy song out of your head.

Editor’s Note: When I met Estrella Rosenberg April 8 at the Nonprofit Technology Conference, she told me about the Foursquare 100×100 campaign to launch two days later. No one had used Foursquare in this way previously, and I immediately knew she was on to a breakthrough idea. I asked her to send me a writeup once it was over, and this is her guest post below.

When April 1st rolled around I had been investigating how non-profits use Foursquare and brainstorming how they could  use it for a couple of months. Although not a direct method of fundraising my thoughts were still along those lines…and then a question popped into my head. Could Foursquare be used for awareness and advocacy?

1 in 100 children are born with a heart defect. My two nonprofits Big Love Little Hearts and One Hundred Squared serve the Congenital Heart Defect (CHD) community. When was the 100th day of the year? It happened to be nine days later, April 10th. My next question was: “could I come up with a campaign in nine days, launch it and have it be successful?”  I had no idea but I’m not afraid of failure so I set out to create a Foursquare experiment.

The basic premise was this – we created a hashtag, #100X100, that stood for 1 in 100 on the 100th day of the year. I created a website, http://onehundredsquared.com to explain what it was, why it was important and to determine the actions we wanted supporters to take: spread awareness using the hashtag and call/write their representatives asking them to support the Congenital Heart Futures Act and Pulse-Ox screening of CHD to the National Newborn Screening Panel. We also created a Facebook fanpage and Twitter profile.

We recruited volunteers to commit to a guerrilla, grass-roots effort to use Foursquare to parlay our message. On the evening of April 9th a few dozen Big Love Little Hearts volunteers added the following as a “tip” to 600 Foursquare locations:  “1in100 children are born w/ a heart defect. Pulse-Ox screening saves lives – you can too! Check in with the hashtag #100X100.” We also embedded a link in the tip to the One Hundred Squared website. We chose what we thought would be the most checked-in locations on a Saturday: airports, Starbucks’, Target’s, gym’s, etc. in every major city.

One of the benefits of using Foursquare as an origin point is that most people who use it sync their check-ins to Twitter and Facebook. This meant that one person checking with #100X100 had the possibility of being viewed across three different platforms with three audiences. Talk about bang for your (time) buck!

Did it work? Better than I could have possibly imagined.  My goal was to see how social media worked for advocacy and awareness. However, something extraordinary happened: I began foursquaring/tweeting/facebooking about #100X100 at 12:01 am on April 10 and Big Love Little Hearts’ supporters followed.

At 7:30 am an angel who was following one of our followers on Twitter (but not us) noticed our hashtag. (She is an adult with a CHD who was not diagnosed at birth and who is alive today because she received lifesaving surgery.) Her passion for our work led her to call me and commit to donating $1 for every time someone used the #100X100 hashtag until midnight April 10th.

How much did we raise?  She gave me a cap of $25,000. I knew the moment she said it that as a not-quite ten month old organization we wouldn’t reach the cap. Much to my surprise our supporters were so engaged that we reached it by almost half.

At quarter to midnight the hashtag had been used 11,703 times across all three platforms. Our donor was so impressed that she committed all $25,000, which funded 12 surgeries in developing countries. Twelve lives saved in 24 hours.

That’s great (okay, FANTASTIC), but did it work for advocacy and awareness? YES! Less than two weeks after the 100th day of the year about 100 people from various CHD groups were to meet in Washington  for CHD Lobby Day. The One Hundred Squared website, as linked through Foursquare and the hashtag, asked people to contact their representatives. We wanted to plant a seed for anyone who used #100X100 on the 10th to call their Senator or Congressman and let them know that they supported measures that would greatly improve the lives of the 2 million people living with CHD in the states.

On the April 22 (CHD Lobby Day) we used the hashtag via Twitter, Facebook and Foursquare to remind our supporters to call their legislators. By noon more people had looked at the website than the entirety of April 10. I had seven appointments with Senators  & Congressman from Illinois that day. There wasn’t a single one I walked into where their aide didn’t inform me that constituents had been calling about this all day. People Lobby Day delegates from other states texted or called me to say the same. More than 500 people told me that they had contacted their representative, and 300 others contacted the Big Love office to do the same. 1800+ viewed the page and clicked through the link to find their representative. I cried with pride the entire day.

What was the benefit of using Foursquare as our social-media springboard? The tips we left are still there and will stay there perpetually. For several locations our tip is still the most recent. Did I mention that we have a link embedded in the tip?

A huge “thank you” to everyone who participated in #100X100 on April 10h and 22 – you made it such a success that the Big Love Little Hearts sister organization, 1 in 100, changed its name and expanded its mission. (Check back with http://onehundredsquared.com soon – or subscribe -for more details)!

One last nugget – all of this was FREE. We raised $25,000, saved 12 lives in the immediate and set the stage for millions of lives to be changed.

Estrella Rosenberg is the Founder and Director of Big Love Little Hearts, One Hundred Squared, Little Leo Foundation and The 4F Club. She writes about her love of non-profit work in her blog, Adventures In Philanthropy.

Big Love Little Hearts provides lifesaving surgery to children with congenital heart defects in developing countries. Almost one million children are born with a heart defect worldwide every year – half will need surgery to survive. Ninety percent will be born in countries where access to lifesaving measures is limited by economic status or lack of infrastructure. Follow them on Twitter. Follow One Hundred Squared on Twitter here.

I had the pleasure of presenting to the Israel Venture Network Fellows today about social media strategy, campaigns, and fundraising. I am really struck me how much of online fundraising comes down to a combination of social media basics plus community organizing principles. The slide show (below) captures why online campaigns are the social proof of these concepts.

Amy Sample Ward, Ivan Boothe, and myself created a slide show for the workshop that we’ll be giving at the Nonprofit Technology Conference. As part of the workshop Bringing Community Organizing Into Online Campaigns, we debated the essential elements of a good online campaign (fundraising or otherwise), the basic tenets of community organizing, and the nature of community organizing. We came up with five basic community organizing concepts. These concepts apply perfectly to any fundraising campaign. They are:

• movement-building
• power analysis
• community accountability (transparency)
• being where the stakeholders are
• leadership development

With any online fundraising campaign, your organization will be speaking about the project and asking others to influence their online ties to do the same. Take the basic principles of social media and continue to use them to raise funds: have shareable content and share utility, utilize the power of influence marketing and the power of weak ties, offer a great product/content, recognize people who give, and thank them profusely. Allow others to have the conversation about you publicly. (And use this opportunity to recruit new stakeholders to your social spaces.) Now mix that with community organizing and this is what you get:

• Link your fundraising project to the larger cause movement to give it emphasis and compelling context
• Power mapping: ID influencers, key donors, and how the donors will share and influence
  
• Develop online influencers and key online donors into organizational leaders
• Be where the people are: make sure that online activity within the campaign occurs where your stakeholders are
• Transparency means: broadcast as much about the campaign, on the campaign site and social media, as it happens

I think of this presentation as a starting point: what else would you consider the “fundamental principles” of social network fundraising? What have I missed? What have I mentioned that’s essential?

(Thanks to Amy Sample Ward for providing the screen shots of the Tweetsgiving campaign example in the slide show, below.)

Resources:

Epic Change (the folks who bring you Tweetsgiving)

How Social Media Can Engage New Donors – slideshare presentation by Steve Drake

Bringing Community Organizing Into Online Campaigns – presentation developed for the upcoming NTC workshop April 9, 2010

If you’re planning a social media campaign, how important is it to integrate bloggers before and during the campaign? I’m referring to social media campaigns launched on a platform(s) other than a blog platform.

People join causes because they know and trust either the organization itself, or someone associated with the cause. Translating this to our virtual lives, outside bloggers have the reach and trust to be that friend that recruits others to a cause or a campaign. I know this from my community organizing days: friends bring friends into a a cause or a campaign. The strongest advocates become the best recruiters.

Bloggers not only have reach within their community, but they amplify their reach through social bookmarking (Digg, StumpleUpon, etc), re-tweets, and of course leveraging their personal twitter networks. Also, bloggers tell compelling stories. From John Haydon: “Bloggers can have the biggest impact in online campaigns by telling a sincere, heartfelt story. They can also have a big impact by knowing who among their readers would also stand up and take action for particular causes.” During social media campaigns, bloggers are the grease that can push a campaign forward, help it gain momentum, and bring needed attention and value when it is faltering.

I believe that bloggers play an integral role in the success of the campaign, and I spent some time trying to find evidence of their contributions to online campaigns.

Opportunity International Australia: Micro Finance Trust Fund Camapaign

As an Australian ambassador for Opportunity International, Jasmin Tragas pledged to raise $10,000 to create a micro finance trust fund for female entrepreneurs in the Philippines. She created an online fundraising campaign, and blogger relations was integral to iy.  As part of the campaign, Jasmin created an eBook about female world shapers entitled “WorldShapers: Extraordinary Women Making a Difference.” Many of the women featured in the book wrote blog posts about the cause and championed the campaign. (Disclosure: I was one of the women featured in the eBook.) When I asked Jasmin to describe the role of bloggers in the campaign, she replied, “huge in terms of getting visibility. Not just bloggers writing about the campaign but also sharing in fun blog challenges. This raised the profile and brand. Blogging may not have helped right away but that it increased visibility over time. I was describing it to friends earlier today as a trickle effect.”

Visible Government: Beers for Canada

Beers for Canada was a social media campaign run by Visible Government to fund software to monitor government transparency. According to an interview with Alistair Croll on Beth’s Blog, the organizers pre-seeded the 3-day campaign by identifying and speaking with key bloggers and twitterers, who brought their voices to the campaign. Incredibly popular and respected bloggers (Tim O’Reily, Om Malik. Tara Hunt) also tweeted about the campaign.

Epic Change: Tweetsgiving 2008

Epic Change’s Tweetsgiving  2008 event was extremely successful in terms of the amount of tweets, publicity and funds raised to build a school in Tanzania. In Avi Kaplan’s Tweetgiving analysis, he writes that the campaign pre-seeded the event with a few bloggers, but not many. The blogger mentions began to roll in as the campaign gained momentum, resulting in over 100 press and blogger mentions. Deeper analysis revealed that 15% of the visits to the donation/Epic Change Tweetsgiving site came from blog posts and articles. Avi writes: “the press we received was so valuable to Epic Change and continues to benefit the organization, but in terms of raw traffic, it looks like word of mouth and twitter mentions were the main drivers.”

Epic Change: Tweetsgiving 2009

This year’s Tweetsgiving 2009 social media campaign (November 24 – 26) embraced and integrated bloggers. The Tweetsgiving website encourages participants to self-organize into groups; the “Blogger’s Group” is one of them. Organizers also pre-seeded the campaign by asking influencers within certain online communities to bring their own “flock of Turkeys” (my wording, not theirs) to the event, essentially turning these influencers into recruiters and campaign leaders. (Disclosure: I am a member of this group, called Wild Turkeys – their wording, not mine.) John Haydon (one of the campaign leaders) told me that “for Tweetsgiving, the main role bloggers have is encouraging their communities to participate.”

How important are bloggers to online campaigns? Very.

A trusted blogger is the Walter Cronkite of his/her community.

Walter Cronkite was “the most trusted man in America” for decades. If he would have told my parents to donate money to your cause, I’m sure they would have opened up their checkbook and written one right then. Use trusted bloggers to be your campaign’s Walter Cronkite.

Have any of you been involved in campaigns that use bloggers? How was the blogger element integral to the campaign’s success? Did you learn any great lessons or best practices you’d like to share here? I hope that this is the beginning of a list of campaigns that have used bloggers, and anecdotes about the effect of blogging on the outcomes. I’ll keep the list as a reference guide for others planning their next social media campaigns.  Look forward to the hearing about the campaigns!

I asked Brenna Holmes if she would write a guest post for this blog after she commented on my last post, Understanding How Facebook Pages Grow. In this post, she details how the California State Parks Foundation’s Facebook Fan Page grew from 517 fans as of May 31, 2009 to over 45,000 fans today. Here is her story, as a Guest Author:

At the end of May, CSPF learned about state budget cuts that would great affect the parks. They alerted us at Adams Hussey & Associates (AH&A) and we quickly made plans for a full multi-channel effort to stop the budget cuts and looming 220 park closures. This effort included direct mail, telemarketing, emails, and social networking. As a main part of the online strategy, AH&A recommended daily updates to the homepage at www.calparks.org with the latest news, creating an Action Center on their site, and optimizing their existing Facebook fan page to promote issue awareness, discussion, and hopefully new activists and members for CSPF.

The Friend Get Friend campaign launched on Tuesday, May 26, on Facebook via an update to the 517 fans. The update (seen below) explained the imminent threat parks were facing and put a deadline – Friday, May 29 – and a goal – 5,000 fans to recipients.

“This year’s cuts are 10 times as bad, so we need 10 times the fans on Facebook.”

We also still have the message below on the fan page near the action links and logo. “Find us on Facebook” language and graphics are featured in every email and all over the site.  Here is our message:

By midnight on Friday CSPF had reached 4,467 fans – not quite the goal, but by Saturday they reached 6,263 fans! The second FB update was sent Monday, June 1 at 12:12 p.m. PST, stressing a 24 hour deadline, asking for fans and petition signatures. The California budget committee was scheduled to meet on June 2, so media coverage was at its height and we were in contact with the house file and CSPF’s partners online and on the phone. CSPF sent out emergency donation requests in all channels and had an online petition to stop park closures.

The chart below (from our Facebook Insights) shows the growth in NEW FANS daily.

As you can see the largest growth was on Monday, June 1, where CSPF gained 3,369 new fans in just one day.

A tight deadline always spurs action online and when supporters can get instant feedback on the effects of their efforts (seeing fan numbers grow) it makes them even more motivated. On average CSPF’s page still get about 100 new fans per day. And while the unsubcribes have increased over time, CSPF still nets growth on new fans and typically on daily page views and site interactions as well.

Since the launch of that second update, CSPF has sent four other FB updates and has made many status updates that send the messages into fans’ newsfeeds. Most of the time the updates give supporters the latest news, but they also sent acknowledgements, posted two subsequent petitions, and promoted an offline event – SOS Weekend and asking supporters to download signs and send in pictures of themselves with the signs. Many parks held large organized events that weekend too. Over 5,000 people went to more than half the state parks that weekend (June 20-21) and sent in pictures as well as posting them to the fan page. All of the updates encourage fans to post to the wall, upload pictures, share their stories, concerns, and hopes about California’s state parks system.

The graph below shows the number of interactions per post, which includes comments, photos, and “likes”, so you can see that the fans really use the page to talk to each as well as to CSPF. We have even seen supporters create videos and individual fundraising drives all on their own and promote their activities on the FB page.

The massive growth of this fan page caught the media’s attention and was mentioned on several TV news spots and in national news articles.  While Sacramento never made a public mention of the social media activist efforts, but CSPF’s “State Access Pass” bill came up for a vote. Thought the vote failed, this was the first time in many years that the legislature even brought it out of committee for a floor vote.

AH&A is still working with CSPF to save the parks. The California budget passed at the end of July will not close the originally proposed 220 parks, but 100 are still on the chopping block. CSPF has recently expanded its outreach to Twitter. Please follow @CSPFoundation and help us save California’s magnificent state parks and beaches! We are also focusing on converting the 45K activists from Facebook into full CSPF members, and of course maintaining activities and engagement on Facebook.

Adams Hussey & Associates will be publishing the full multi-channel case study on this campaign in the fall or winter of this year.

Brenna Holmes is an Online Account Executive at Adams Hussey & Associates. She is responsible for implementing innovative and successful email and social media campaigns by applying cutting edge Web 2.0 techniques. Brenna is also a graphic designer and a fervent foodie and wine lover – being from the Napa Valley, CA it’s only natural ☺ Brenna tweets as @bfholmes.

Brenna Holmes