Plant a Tree! Outreach International launches new Facebook Application with Multi-Channel Marketing Approach
Posted by:
Jordan Viator on
June 30, 2008 at
10:37AM EST
Outreach International, an organization whose mission is to "help the poor help themselves" and "develop the capacity to create a new future for themselves and their community" launched its first Facebook application online Friday. And with all the new pages, groups and applications springing to life on the popular social networking site, it's sometimes difficult to keep up with all the exciting activity and innovation taking place. To explain more about the idea and strategy behind the new application, Andrew Betts, OI Marketing Director, sat down and shared a few details about the project in an interview.
Share with us the idea and details behind the Outreach International Facebook application? (Name, overall objective, other goals)
Outreach International had created a Facebook page in the past, called sustainable good, which had around 900 people sign up. However, we want to embrace the full potential of Facebook and engage with our audience in a more tangible and relevant way. The best solution for us to achieve this was to create something that would be seen in their profiles and be updated regularly with a great deal of brand awareness for the cause. The Facebook application will be able to act as a ‘badge for the cause’, it needs to be an application that says what they believe in as much as what we (the organization) are able to offer. That way people would not only be interested in having the application on their profile, but also interested in recruiting others to add the application.
The campaign:
Convio came to us and suggested we do a relief aid appeal for the Myanmar cyclone disaster, however as we talked, there were two concerns about that. The first concern, was at the time we talked about doing the campaign, there was an ever decreasing level of media attention that would have left the campaign highly unpredictable in terms of its success. The second concern, was that Outreach International deal with long term solutions and the cyclone appeal need was a more short term solution.
As we spoke further, I decided that we needed to focus on a long term solution project, where the audience could play a tangible part in our story. Therefore, we decided that we would focus on our deforestation work that we had recently done in a few developing country communities, planting 100,000 trees.
As we talked with Convio, they were very clear as to how this concept of deforestation could work and we decided that for every person that added the application, we would pledge to add a tree into a developing country community. For those that wanted to add more trees, they would give a $5 donation for every 10 trees planted. They would then be ranked in order of how many trees they had planted and this would be noted in the application on their Facebook profile.
The goal is to gain 1,000 people giving $5 each.
What made your organization decide to use Facebook for this campaign? Will you be using any multi-channel marketing tactics with this application? If so, why?
We have used email communication a lot with our current donor base, which we believe has been successful in sharing information and updating donors on the work that we are currently doing. However we also wanted to reach a different audience, as we understand the power in creating excitement in a younger generation to become an advocate for our cause.
Convio told us about the difference in email usage for a younger audience, and from that advice, we believed that a social network would create the kind of environment that we needed to communicate our message and engage with this audience. And to do so without our brand being seen as email spam.
We will however use email and other forms of promotion to communicate the launch of the application to our current constituency, but believe the greatest level of growth will come from within the Facebook community itself.
Is this the first time your organization has used social media for marketing and outreach purposes? If so, why have you waited until now? If not, what social media assets did you have before this project and what have your experiences and results using social media been like, so far?
Outreach International has a Facebook page and Myspace site, however our experience with social networking so far has been positive and useful, but it has not been massively impacting or engaging compared to a relative other number of NGO’s on social network sites.
Is there anything you have learned from past nonprofit applications and social media projects? What advice would you share with a nonprofit looking to try new, social media projects such as this?
I think it needs to be something that is interactive, informative and relevant. If the application fails in checking all these boxes then it is likely to be a short lived application.
Want to add the Plant a Tree! application? You can find it here on Facebook.
(1) Comments
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Posted by: home business on July 2, 2008 7:33AM EST
In the past, network marketing, affiliate marketing, multilevel marketing was labeled as an unreliable source of income and it was usually associated with negative connotations such as scam and fraud.
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