Why Give Five?
About a month ago Janet Owens with the United Way approached Harrington Design to help with marketing strategy for a viral campaign. The concept was beautifully simple. Give $5 and ask 5 of your friends to give $5.
Easy enough right? Well, the Twin Cities launched a similar campaign and it flopped. Viral marketing is harder than it seems. You can't force something to be viral. It either is or it is not. Our task was to develop a strategy and oversee the development of a Flash Movie, testimonial video and Web site. In about 4 weeks. I worked closely with Dianne Austria, the United Way's in house designer to design and build the materials.
Thanks to the amazing team of Melanie Husk, John Willman, Craig TerBlanche, Wendy Hummel, Elizabeth Ash and others who helped put this together.
So that was the easy part. Now we have to spread the word. We are looking for people who have active social networks to blog, tweet, facebook, LinkIn, IM the heck out this. And of course, give your 5.
So what are you waiting for? Seriously, do it now.
posted by J. Douglas @ 3:45 PM
4 Comments:
Jeff, thank you for making the Jacksonville area a better place by working with your local United Way! I am an employee at Greater Twin Cities United Way, and now more than ever we depend on local
businesses like yours to help us get our word out.
Your assertion that the Twin Cities give5 viral campaign "flopped" is inaccurate. By any account this video was a tremendous success. It was picked up by every major local news source, created a tremendous buzz, and raised over $20,000 directly through the website give5now.org. These gifts were primarily from an untapped resource: non-workplace donors. To top it all off, one generous person saw the give5 story on the local TV news and wrote a check to United Way for $500,000.
If our give5 campaign was a flop, I truly can't wait to see what a moderately successful viral campaign will do for our community.
Andrew Rustad
Graphic/Interactive Designer
Greater Twin Cities United Way
rustada@unitedwaytwincities.org
Hello Andrew,
I'm thrilled to hear about the success of your campaign and appreciate you setting the record straight.
I was told the TC campaign only raised $6000.
We're at about 28K now, which is about half our goal. Any suggestions on how to keep the momentum going?
Thank you for your response. That number, 6000, probably was the number of unique visitors we had to give5now.org (at that particular time).
I am impressed with what you've raised so far! I noticed you have a triple match. That really must be giving people a great incentive to give. I wish we would have done that! Also, I like the gauge you have at the bottom of the page showing people where the campaign is at. I hope you don't mind if we borrow these ideas for our next campaign.
One thing that boosted visitors to our site more than anything was the story that ran in our largest local newspaper:
http://www.startribune.com/local/36146814.html This story had a link to give5now.org and we had a massive number of click-throughs to our site from this one story. I think it's huge to compel a large audience already in front of their computers to click a simple link.
Thanks again, Jeff. I'm glad I found your blog--I already shared that periodic table of typefaces with some coworkers.
Andrew
Andrew, you touched on a really good point. A campaign is either viral or it's not.
It's great that you have that wisdom. We've all seen plenty of viral campaigns either fail or never reach the tipping point because they didn't have that simple element that makes people get excited and spread the message: RELEVANCE.
I'll look for the links to check out the campaign... Let us know how it goes!
@michelletripp
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