Dec
08
2010
08
2010
Digital Death provides boon of Life for kids charity
Running an effective social media campaign is no easy task for any company, but for a charity with limited marketing resources that challenge is especially difficult.
Perhaps the greatest success to date of an excellent charitable social media campaign was the Nike Chalkbot, which promoted the LIVESTRONG campaign on the Tour de France raising awareness and money for the Lance Armstrong Foundation. Now Digital Death has leveraged the power of Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, the three most popular social forums online to raise money for the Keep a Child Alive Foundation.
Celebrities including Alicia Keys, Elijah Wood and Serena Williams all died a “digital death” by promising not to use Facebook or Twitter until they raised $1 million for the charity, thereby resurrecting their digital selves.
Visits to the Digital Death website buylife.org spiked dramatically on 1 December when the campaign was launched. The website saw traffic increase by 13-fold that day and was the sixth most popular charity website visited online by UK Internet users.
The celebs all recorded a YouTube video urging the public to donate in order to fight HIV/AIDS in Africa and India.
This was reflected in the downstream websites visited after the Digital Death website, with YouTube accounting for 15.79% of all visits. Interestingly, YouTube Mobile was the second biggest site visited after Digital Death which highlights just how popular the mobile version of YouTube has become.
In total 60% of all traffic coming to the Digital Death website was generated from social media, and 38% of the sites visited after Digital Death were social media sites. The word of mouth and buzz generated by the likes of Facebook and Twitter helped raise $450,000 in just six days. The charity then raised a further $500,000 from a single donation from pharmaceutical billionaire Stewart Rahr. Proof that social media can be used by charities to great effect.
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Robin, you must be one of the few people I’ve come across who considers this campaign a success.
While they may have achieved their goal, web traffic, etc., the fact is that the entire premise of the campaign was a complete antithesis to what social media is supposed to be about. These celebrities essentially tried to “threaten” their fans/followers into donating, and when they got tired of their “death,” they got someone to cough up the not-insignificant amount that was needed in order for them to come back to life, as it were.
I’ve written extensively about this, as have others, so I’m not going to regurgitate that.
If we’re going by pure numbers, yes they achieved their goal. But at what cost to their reputation? And further, was there some plan to capture this traffic and convert it?
And one last thing: the “word of mouth and buzz generated by the likes of Facebook and Twitter” did not result in significant donations over those six days; again, it took a rich philanthropist to bail them out and put an end to this campaign.