Bullying UK launches Twitter campaign using hash tags
Howard Lake | 23 October 2008 | Blogs
Fresh from winning a TalkTalk Innovation in the Community Award yesterday, Bullying UK has launched a new online campaign harnessing micro-blogging tool Twitter.
Set up within an hour, the campaign encourages Twitter users to post their answers to the question "What do you think of Bullying?". They are encouraged to tell the world via Twitter and to include the "hashtag" of #bullying in their message. This makes it easy for Bullying UK and indeed anyone interested to keep up to date with messages on this subject.
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Bullying UK can then feature all the messages on their site using the widget they created at Widgetbox.com, as indeed can other supporters.
Or they could pull in the latest messages via a RSS feed and related widget that they created at twemes.com. This is what it looks like:
There’s a pretty good chance too that this initiative will attract many more people who will choose to ‘follow’ Bullying UK’s messages on Twitter. It’s the kind of activity that is likely to be ‘trended’, or appear on the front page of Twitter’s search page indicating the most popular terms that are being used at the moment.
All of this initiative was created in very quick time and using freely available web tools. Cost? Not very much at all. Potential to spread the word about bullying and build up a network of interested supporters? Considerable.
And all of this is of course easily emulated by any other organisation. Just swap the hashtag for the issue(s) or campaign that your charity is working on.
UK Fundraising, for example, used hashtags to enable people to follow posts about last weeks International Fundraising Congress. It was open for anyone else to tag posts with #ifc08 and they did, building up a small but focused feed of messages about the Congress:
http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23ifc08
About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.