An Awesome Example of Using Social Media for Cause Marketing
November 08, 2010
Instead of talking about how Facebook can make money for businesses, let’s talk about how social media can help charities and non-profit organizations in your community. Marketing to improve awareness or to promote a particular charity is called cause marketing. Some of you may be familiar with the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure or the Live Strong campaigns. These are two very popular examples of cause marketing. However, these campaigns are run with huge budgets and tons of staff. How can you get awareness in your local community for a cause that you care about?
As a local example, the Often Awesome organization has been using social media for over a year to help raise awareness about ALS, sometimes known as Lou Gehrig’s disease or motor neuron disease in Great Britain. In 2009, Tim LaFollette, a graduate of Guilford College, was diagnosed with an extremely aggressive form of ALS. To give you a shortened version of what ALS is, basically your nerve cells waste away or die slowly, leaving the person in a paralyzed body with a fully functioning mind. His friends and wife organized what they call the Often Awesome Army to help raise awareness about Tim’s condition and raise money to improve his quality of life.
The Often Awesome Army has combined grass roots efforts like fundraising with web-friendly promotional techniques using Facebook, YouTube, and a centralized website for information and donations. Every two weeks, a new episode of the web video series is released and promoted online through various social media outlets and the website. This powerful tool has allowed thousands of people to get to know Tim and raised awareness about ALS. Through cross promotion on Facebook, each episode gets out to tons of people through the Often Awesome Facebook Page and through members of the organization and other interested folks posting the video to their friends.
The overall results of the campaign have been phenomenal. Tim now has round the clock care, local ALS awareness has increased significantly, and a strong community of friends has been built around this cause. Most importantly, the organization will continue after Tim has left us with a group of dedicated people who otherwise would not have been involved in an ALS awareness campaign.
So how can this information help you? If you are passionate about a cause in your local community, start a Facebook page and promote it to your friends. Get your local church community or other organizations you belong to involved. Post to a Twitter account regularly with links to educational articles to raise awareness. Promote real world fundraising events using your online support network, and create ambassadors for your cause through your social networks. Use a multimedia approach like Often Awesome to get across important points to visual learners. Tell a compelling story that inspires people to become involved in your cause.
If you would like to become a part of the Often Awesome Army to raise awareness about ALS, you can visit the website and donate, view the YouTube web series, and follow on Twitter. If you are a part of a local business, contact us to see how you can get involved in helping Often Awesome. We’ll be posting more regularly about this great organization, so stay tuned for more updates.
