Social Media Roadblock: An Interview with Wendy Harman, Red Cross - Social Media Strategy Case Study

For the WeAreMedia Module 4: Spreading Awareness and Buzz With Social Media, the community has built an awesome resource - lots of tips, resources, and ideas from people's experience.   To top it off, I did an interview with Wendy Harman from the Red Cross about her recent experience using Twitter and other tools to spread buzz for campaign -  Social Media Roadblock

1. Tell me about the campaign - what, why,objectives

The Social Media Roadblock campaign's objective was to encourage social media activists to show solidarity with the Red Cross by displaying Red Cross PSAs, videos, photos, widgets, on their online spaces. We also encouraged people to change their avatars (see above).  It was an echo campaign to complement a radio roadblock on Friday, September 19, 2008 when the NAB encouraged all radio stations to run a Red Cross PSA at 1 pm EDT. We hoped to created more awareness of the need for support for all of those affected by recent disasters. Our key objective was to make a viral splash, to spread dynamic content, to increase donations to the ARC Disaster Relief Fund.

2. How did you implement it?

Well, I knew about the radio Roadblock for about 4 days before the event, but it wasn't until about 9:30 am last Thursday morning that I was hit with the idea for the social media roadblock complement.  That meant we had less than 24 hours to implement.  I quickly reached out to our advertising department to bounce the idea off of them (they're responsible for NAB relationship and PSAs). They liked it and said go for it.

I asked my current volunteer (who happens to be a social media genius and a member of ARC's National Youth Council) to draft a "press release" announcing it. I wouldn't normally do a press release, but on such short notice we needed to get the word out. I also knew that it would take too long to get all the proper approvals in-house for a press release issued on the wire. I contacted our media relations lead and she suggested sending it out on free distribution services social media and pitch engine.

I had already been working on the social media tools wiki so we could offer our supporters a bunch of easy ways to help online. That was useful considering our time crunch.  We put the release out and miraculously got it posted to the "Press" section on redcross.org (beyond my expectations!). It's great to have a "legitimate" URL to point to.  I posted a blog entry announcing it on Redcrosschat.org, and we used twitter to announce. We have enough Red Crossers on Twitter for that to get attention - they retweeted to their communities and we were off to the races.

We have several chapters who are social media savvy. Our Rock River, IL chapter communicator was able to get a 2 minute piece about the roadblock on their NBC affiliate's evening news that Thursday night, which was uber exciting for us. Other chapters announced it on their blogs, in Twitter, etc.

We also got our media relations lead to call in an Utterli explaining the roadblock. This turned out to be key because the founders of Utterli listened and ended up sending the announcement to ALL of their users AND starting a group just for American Red Cross social media supporters.

On the actual day, I reached out to bloggers like you and  Kami Watson Huyse, John Cass, Ike Pigott, our friends at Good2gether, and other social media big wigs I am privileged to know and asked them to help spread the word.

3. What were the challenges?

VERY SHORT NOTICE.

The Red Cross is trying to raise $100 million before the end of the year and lots of focus is now on social media initiatives to help get that done. I saw an opportunity to take 2 spheres and make each of them bigger than they would have been on their own, so I jumped at it.  My fear is that I won't be able to do it again before the end of the year, so of course I would have enjoyed more time to plan and implement a bigger splash.

4. What were the results? Anything surprise you?

I think we did ok. In some ways we sort of shook our own house and I'm not sure how far outside our already active supporters we reached. I think we could have overcome this and had a hugely broad reach with a bit more time to plan. That said, I had tears of joy at the outpouring of support by the end of the day on Friday.

I also believe that it's more inspiring for an individual to feel moved enough by a cause and take action independently of the nonprofit. I am skittish about launching too many of these experiments by the Red Cross National Headquarters when I feel sure it would be more impactful for human beings to do it. That's why I'm making the wiki full of tools - so it'll be super easy for anyone to do this to support victims of disaster.

(Beth's Note:  Wendy kindly shared her documentation of the campaign here

I can't emphasize enough how important it is to document results like this so you can see what happened and evaluate.  I think this is the key to Wendy's successes)

5. What would you do differently next time?

Well, I'd say I would plan in advance, but these things tend to happen exactly like this at the Red Cross, so we always have to be prepared to act really quickly. I would have spent more time on Thursday night reaching out to my social media friends. I would have maybe spent more time asking people to share the info on Facebook.

I would have started a hashtag for Twitter.

I'd try to figure out how in the world to measure how many people changed their avatars. I have no idea! Seriously, measurement is always tricky in this space. Is it a success because 100 people tweeted to their 5 million friends? I think we need to tie back to how much money was brought in on Friday, even though we asked people to help us fundraise, not to donate themselves.

I hope we'll be able to build on this experience as we go through this massive fundraising campaign without wearing out our welcome. I want to really empower people to help other people and not browbeat the message that the Red Cross needs money - all the money we're raising for the Disaster Relief Fund will help those who are impaced by disasters.

6. Advice to other nonprofits about doing this?

During National Preparedness Month (September) my best advice is to always be prepared to react quickly to implement online campaigns that will complement offline activities. Opportunities to showcase social media's value in context of a larger picture is always useful here, so that's why we jumped on this one.

Comments

[Beth Kanter]

Here's the wiki
http://redcrossfundraisingtools.wikispaces.com/