Integrated Social Media Campaigns = Great Fundraising Results (World Development Movement Case Study)
Howard Lake | 10 February 2012 | Blogs
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Planning strategically your organisation’s integrated campaigns can lead to outstanding fundraising results. The World Development Movement (WDM) is a UK-based anti-poverty campaigning organisation with a worldwide reputation for tackling hard-hitting, controversial issues. Throughout the years, WDM has campaigned on a wide range of issues such as development aid, water privatisation, the arms trade, IMF and World Bank reform, climate change and food speculation.
WDM recently launched a social media campaign to highlight the role of speculation on food prices in causing hunger and poverty, and to put pressure on Chancellor George Osborne to support new regulations to curb food speculation. The Real George Osborne (www.therealgeorgeosborne.com) is a series of short comedy films, following a fictional George Osborne in his quest to become more popular with the public.
Through a form on the site, members of the public were asked to write to Mr Osborne, asking him to regulate food speculation. WDM also set up a parody Twitter account for George Osborne, @mrgeorgeosborne and published regular humorous blog posts written from the perspective of George. Pontus Westerberg, Web Officer at WDM explained “We developed a PR strategy that included bloggers and political websites as well as traditional media. We also did some additional fun things on Twitter, like creating a ‘Twitter storm’, where hundreds of people tweeted the HM Treasury Twitter account asking it to regulate food speculation.”
The campaign site received 25% of its traffic from Facebook and Google, the videos had 36,102 views on YouTube and 2,471 people signed up to the campaign. In terms of fundraising, the campaign generated 250 new regular donors for WDM. Social media will continue to play a big part in WDM’s advocacy work in the future. “It requires a lot of engagement to be successful with social media and each site requires a different approach”, Pontus admitted. “For example, still visuals like cartoons and infographics work really well on Facebook and Pinterest, while videos are great for Google+, and blog posts and articles on Twitter. It’s important to take a strategic approach and focus on what you want to achieve.”
Social media is an important part of WDM’s campaigning. It has 9,612 followers on Twitter, 5,709 Facebook fans and is active on YouTube, Flickr, Google+ and Pinterest. The WDM blog has thousands of visitors per month.
*I would like to thank Pontus Westerberg of World Development Movement for sharing his insights and helping me develop this case study.
**This post was published first at www.AdvantageNFP.com
Vasileios Kospanos is a B2B and social media marketing professional, who has been working with charities for the past five years from the Gestalt Centre in London, and recently with AdvantageNFP in Redbourn. You can find him on Twitter at @vasilakosp and @AdvantageNFP. Views here his own.
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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.