Using Social Media for Social Good - Morra Aarons-Mele - Harvard ...

by Morra Aarons-Mele??|??10:30 AM November 30, 2012

Last week I wrote about #GivingTuesday, a nationwide campaign to create an annual day of giving en masse to charities or good causes. The event was largely marketed through social media, incredible word of mouth from over 2500 partner organizations, and many stories in traditional media outlets from NPR to regional newspapers. Being three days since the event took place, there's now some convincing evidence that this real-life case study is proving the hard ROI of social media.

#GivingTuesday had its share of cynics. They objected mostly to two things: First, as a social media marketing campaign, it risked being a PR stunt that did very little for increasing charitable donations or actions. Second, that staging a national day of giving would "cannibalize" traditional end of year giving. I can only address the first point here, as the second remains to be seen.

Take the fundraising firm Blackbaud, which processed $10 million in online donations on inaugural #GivingTuesday ? a massive 53% increase when compared to the Tuesday after Thanksgiving the previous year. Or #GivingTuesday partner Panthera, whose VP Andrea Heydlauff reports "We received over 450 individual donations, amounting to just over $300,000... So far over 40% are new donors. This has surpassed all of our expectations on so many levels and is truly a memorable and perhaps the most significant event in our fundraising history."

So the question is: Did #GivingTuesday work because of social media? We'll never know, although it did become a trending topic on Twitter in the United States on Nov. 1, then again on Nov. 26 and it trended for much of the day on Nov. 27. It also had support from some heavy social media hitters: Bill Gates tweeted his support (retweeted almost 9,000 times), and the White House blogged about the campaign.

As in this case, the intense, continued, and varied discussion on social media can become a modern telethon, minus the hard costs. But it doesn't always work that way.

In my experience social media is only truly effective for fundraising when there is a disaster of incredible magnitude, or perhaps in a high-profile political campaign. For every other cause, you create real action not by chasing the reassuring trending topics, but with old-fashioned organizing. You need a great idea, and you need the network in place to create the wildfire of discussion among diverse networks of online influencers.

#GivingTuesday was a compelling idea: Celebrate a national day of giving back after the consumer glut of Black Friday and Cyber Monday. That fits right into the current zeitgeist, and the call to action was strong and clear.

But how do you create that network? Elbow grease. #GivingTuesday didn't only work because it was a cool social media campaign. It worked because of months of groundwork. This included convening thousands of partners who could sign on for free and contribute in any way they liked, giving lots of people with strong online influence skin in the game. They all promoted it heavily to their various networks. And there, social media was only one piece of the equation: partners also used traditional channels such as email marketing and donor relations.

Why haven't we seen something like #GivingTuesday before? Because even as our increased connectivity has challenged long-held assumptions about what constitutes media, authority, and even friendship, we're still holding on to old-fashioned notions of who gets to be a philanthropist, and how charity should work.

When I interviewed him at the 2012 Social Good Summit, The New York Times columnist and humanitarian Nicholas Kristof spoke about how businesses and their products have smart and successful marketing strategies, but important world issues like poverty and clean water never get the publicity and attention they deserve: "People flinch at the idea of marketing for those [issues] because marketing sounds like something companies do," Kristof said. "But it's so much more important to market ? to get the word out, to message right ? about issues of life or death."

What's more, social-good marketers need to address different audiences using different platforms. Kristof's Half The Sky movement used a "transmedia strategy" and platforms from a PBS documentary to Facebook games to reach ? and spur to action ? women and men of all ages and backgrounds.

It's time for marketers in the social good space to fully embrace marketing across media, but also to take a deep breath and realize that every successful campaign relies on a smart social media strategy ? and always, good old-fashioned people power.

Source: http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/11/using_social_media_for_social.html

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