As a conference, we have been experimenting with new ideas and approaches on many levels, especially when it comes to incorporating the real-time web into the conference experience itself. One of our favorite experimental initiatives around TWTRCON, however, has been our partnerships with our non-profit partners: Operation Smile at TWTRCON SF, and DonorsChoose.org at TWTRCON DC.
For the DC event, we wanted to use the conference as a platform to create awareness and raise funds for DonorsChoose.org–while at the same time providing a learning opportunity for us and our attendees about how to orchestrate successful Twitter campaigns.
Here’s how it worked: TWTRCON purchased 300 DonorsChoose.org GivingCards, in $5 denominations, and distributed one to every TWTRCON DC 09 attendee, inserting the cards into the back of the badges.
During the conference, Charles Best, the CEO and founder of DonorsChoose.org, gave a great presentation about DonorsChoose.org and how the organization uses social media to connect donors to classrooms in need. At the end of his speech, we asked everyone to use their GivingCards to make a donation to a classroom project of their choice (people could add more funds if they wanted to).
We had created a dedicated landing page, which donors could use to tell their followers about their donation and gave participants a choice of four different types of messages that they could tweet. The goal was to effectiveness of each type of message, as measured by the number of tweets, retweets and clicks. The four types of messages were:
- Amount left (to raise for the classroom project)
- Project name (what the classroom project was about)
- Region (where the classroom was located)
- Teacher’s name
Here are the results:
- 140 TWTRCON DC attendees participated — a 46% participation rate. While we love the symbolism of the 140 number (really, we didn’t make it up!), we had hoped that we could get a higher rate than this. But there was a lot going on and we have learned it is difficult to get people to take a moment away from the networking to focus on something like this.
- The participants supported 139 classrooms, which will provide essential learning resources for 3,614 students.
- The total amount raised by campaign participants was $1238. The remaining unredeemed GivingCards cards will be used to make donations to the same classrooms chosen by the TWTRCON DC attendees, with a total of $2,288 contributed to classrooms through this initiative.
- The most popular message chosen by the participants was the one that included the Project Name (chosen by 54% of participants). Second-most popular was the message the specified how much the project still needed to raise, chosen by 25%. The message with the Teacher’s name was the least popular.
- The Project Name message was also most effective at getting retweet’s, with 71% of all RT’s, or an RT index of 131. Specific information about the project you are helping will get more people involved.
- The second-most effective message for RT’s was the Region, with 14% of RT’s and an 82 index.
- Surprisingly, none of the messages seemed to be more or less effective at driving clicks — the index of clicks for each message type was relatively even.
Net, net: if you’re trying to engage a Twitter community and ask them to get the word out:
a) Make sure they’re not surrounded by 300 other interesting people they’d rather talk to, and
b) Have them give their followers specific information about the project they’re supporting in order to get the retweets!
For additional questions about the case study or DonorsChoose.org, please comment on this blog post, or contact Modern Media at tonia(at)modernmediapartners(dot)com or DonorsChoose.org at kari(at)donorschoose(dot)org.
