Share Our Strength
Using Social Media to Combat Childhood Hunger
Share Our Strength Share Our Strength is the leading national organization working to end childhood hunger in America. In January 2009, in response to President Barack Obama’s call to service, AT&T, the Communications Workers of America, the Mobile Giving Foundation, and Share Our Strength partnered to launch “Operation No Kid Hungry,” a text donation campaign and national food drive. The campaign included opportunities for individuals to hold food drives to help feed those in need on the National Day of Service on January 19, 2009 and beyond.
Through the text giving campaign (which runs through the end of 2009), subscribers of all wireless carriers can donate $5 to Share Our Strength simply by texting “SHARE” to 20222.
Since 1984, Share Our Strength has raised more than $245 million and provided support to more than 1,000 nonprofit organizations through pioneering culinary events, cause marketing initiatives and partnerships with leading corporations like AT&T, the Food Network and American Express, as well as the generosity of individual donors. Its innovation and creativity has helped earn its reputation as one of America’s most effective and high-impact nonprofits.
As the leader in its field, Share Our Strength saw social media networking as an exciting way to widen its range of donors and the impact of its efforts. The campaign combined social media technology with the human touch of hands-on local participation.
“We were delighted with the results of Tuvel Communications’ social media efforts to help launch our first text donation campaign. The response rates proved that social media is a great way to maximize participation in an important service campaign, and showed its power in connecting supporters both nationally and locally. Tuvel’s ability to craft an effective campaign despite little time for extensive research was a real bonus.”
— Margie Fleming Glennon: Communications Director, Share Our Strength
Goals
Share Our Strength (Share Our Strength) needed blogger outreach that built on the extensive on- and offline outreach that AT&T, Share Our Strength, and its partners had underway. Share Our Strength wanted to build awareness of the issue of childhood hunger, encourage individuals to give text donations in support of Share Our Strength’s work to end childhood hunger in America, and encourage participation in the National Day of Service to make a real difference in people’s lives. The organization also wished to grow its list of friends and supporters in the blogging community.
Strategy
Tuvel created a compelling social media strategy to build relationships while engaging bloggers, driving traffic and creating a viral effect by building on past Share Our Strength outreach efforts and identifying those respondents with a propensity to spread the word, as well as potential new participants. Tuvel also created messaging to drive foot traffic to community food banks, as well as engage and entice people to give text donations, and used the micro-blogging tool Twitter to identify hard-to-reach, yet passionate, supporters who, in turn, spread the word through blogs and other social media vehicles.
Tactics
Tuvel identified, qualified and communicated with tech-savvy and lifestyle bloggers to spread the word about the Share Our Strength campaign; adapted messaging and the call-to-action to emphasize food drive and texting themes; created a Twitter promotion to fundraise and create excitement and to increase the number of bloggers who wrote about the campaign and the organization. The campaign created for Share Our Strength by Tuvel convinced participants with thousands of followers to help out and convince their followers to participate in the campaign by texting. Blogger outreach drove people to the client’s food-bank finder at Share Our Strength’s website, http://www.strength.org, so website visitors could find and support local food banks—a key goal of the campaign. Tuvel also created a dedicated area on the website to thank and build relationships with bloggers, with links to participating blogs, which is expected to keep the campaign spirit alive for future efforts.
Results
The campaign crafted by Tuvel for Share Our Strength was highly successful: It increased awareness about childhood hunger and Share Our Strength in the blogosphere and Twittersphere; doubled Share Our Strength’s list of Twitter followers; increased overall website traffic and online donations for that time period; and built social media relationships that will be used in successive fundraising campaigns. The effort achieved 35% response rate in blogger outreach; 50% of bloggers were new or first-time contacts. More than 150 people passed the campaign along through Twitter.
Highlights
Tuvel executed this campaign in short order, with almost no time to get up to speed on client profile, demonstrating both Tuvel’s responsiveness and the power of social media networking tools such as blogging, texting and Twitter.
Achieving Similar Success
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