The Live Case study to support DonorsChoose.org will take place on Thursday 10/22 at about 10:30 am. Anyone can participate & help us raise money and awareness — all while learning about what works in Twitter-based campaigns. We hope you can join us.
I’m not sure I remember who first came up with the idea of combining a live case study with a fundraising campaign, but I do know that Stefanie Michaels (@adventuregirl), Renee Hamilton and Eric Overman from Operation Smile all played a key role. We thought is was a terrific idea: leverage the power of the TWTRCON community to raise awareness and money for a worthy cause, all while giving our participants to get hands-on experience with Twitter-based marketing campaigns. Operation Smile teamed up with us around TWTRCON SF to build the 140smiles campaign. We’re about half-way to our goal of creating 140 smiles–maybe you can help take us a little further: http://140smiles.org/.
For TWTRCON DC, we wanted to find a way to test some specific metrics and make the take-aways even more actionable–in addition to using what we’d learned to increase the bottom-line benefits to our non-profit partner. Our keynote speaker, Craig Newmark, suggested DonorsChoose.org as a partner, and we like the idea of again partnering with a cause that was centered around helping kids.
Over the last few weeks we’ve been working with the DonorsChoose.org tech and marketing teams to come up with a unique campaign that will hopefully help all of us learn a lot about how to apply some traditional direct marketing best practices — message testing — to the new world of social media.
Here’s how the TWTRCON DC 09 live case study is going to work:
- Every single TWTRCON DC attendee will receive a $5 Giving Card when they arrive at the event.
- At about 10:30 am, Charles Best, the CEO of DonorsChoose.org, will invite everyone to use their Giving Card to participate in the live case study. Attendees may increase the amount of their donation, if they choose to do so.
- We have created a dedicated page for people participating in the TWTRCON DC DonorsChoose.org campaign.
- The first thing everyone needs to do is pick a project to support–DonorsChoose.org makes it really easy to find classroom projects based on their location, their focus, or their urgency.
- People starting from the TWTRCON DC campaign page will, after they make their donation, be directed to a page offering them a choice of four different tweets that they can use to tell their friends about the donation they just made, and asking them to join in, and to RT the message. Participants will be able to select one of four messages, each of which focuses on a different aspect of the project they’re supporting:
- how much money still needs to be raised
- the name of the project you are supporting
- the location of the classroom you are supporting
- the name of the teacher whose project you are supporting
- Over the course of the day, we’ll be tracking metrics for each of the four types of messages, and will report back on which type of message was chosen most often, which received the most clicks, and which received the most RT’s.
We’re hoping that, if everyone tweets their messages at about the same time, we can create enough momentum for the campaign that we can really get attention for DonorsChoose.org (maybe we’ll even trend?). We hope we’ll learn something about how to test campaigns, and about what kind of messaging is most effective. And we hope that we’ll help a lot of teachers and classrooms achieve their goals at the same time!
