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Similar to Connecting Up Ice Bucket Challenge presentation by Rachel Rizk
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Connecting Up Ice Bucket Challenge presentation by Rachel Rizk
- 4. Simple enough that even nuns in a convent can do it Google “Redemptoristine nuns Ice Bucket Challenge” for pure joy
- 6. From: www.dailymail.co.uk Committed or just along for the ride?
- 8. Based on communications plan template by Lee Hopkins
- 14. Key points – factors behind the success of the Ice Bucket Challenge •People – find a champion, engage celebrities, the power of personal stories •The nature of the campaign – make it simple (ingredients: water, ice, bucket, smartphone, social media), shareable, fun, visual •Set a challenge – gamify, call to action, grow the campaign by challenging multiple people •Social good – makes people feel good to support a worthy cause
- 15. Key points – enabling the potential of small not-for-profit organisations •Have a living communication plan and consistent key messages •Commit to taking small steps to build communication platforms and marketing collateral over time •Pick a few key points from professional events to implement in your organisation •Spend small budgets wisely – it can pay to invest in technology and communication projects
- 16. • During the campaign act quickly – the media and public will quickly lose interest • Large campaigns will attract criticism, no matter how worthy the cause – keep abreast of issues and quash negativity in the bud • Build engaged social media audiences – they could be your biggest advocates • It’s an exhausting, highly stressful time – look after your colleagues and feel proud of your success • Be prepared to keep riding the wave!
Editor's Notes
- Good afternoon everyone and thank you to Connecting Up for having me speak today. The focus of my presentation is the ALS or MND (they are essentially different names for the same disease) Ice Bucket Challenge that swept the world from July to November last year. You just need to Google to find plenty of analyses of the phenomenon and while I’ll touch on the success of the campaign, I really wanted to provide an insight into what that time was like for MND Australia which was the main beneficiary of IBC donations in Australia. I’ve titled the presentation “Riding the IBC wave – the communications lifelines that kept MND Australia afloat”… because it was just that.
- Here we are. That was the entire MND Australia staff at the time of the IBC. In addition to myself we have Susan who looks after admin and finances, Carol the NED and Janet the Executive Director of Research. We all work part-time and we had a full-time equivalent staff of 2.3. So it took some doing to not drown during the IBC. Let me make it clear that MND Australia was not responsible for the initiation or the viral spread of the IBC. That credit goes to …
- These two young men. Pat Quinn a former athlete and Pete Frates a former Boston College baseball player both live in America and have MND or ALS as the disease is called in some parts of the world. In a nutshell, MND is a terminal disease in which the nerves that control muscles for movement die causing muscles to waste. People with MND lose their ability to walk, speak, swallow and breathe. So back to Pat and Pete. These men came up with the idea of using buckets of ice water as a platform to raise awareness for ALS/MND. After the two men posted their challenge online, the Ice Bucket Challenge quickly spread through Pete’s network of professional sportspeople. And then it went viral. I’m going to show a video now to give you some insight into what it’s like to live with MND and how the IBC came to be a phenomenon. PLAY VIDEO So keep in mind that MND is universally terminal. Pete along with all other people living with MND will not get better, there will be no remission and in most cases he will die from respiratory failure 2 to 3 years after diagnosis. But what a champion, what an inspiration. A young handsome man with a beautiful family who has been stripped of his baseball, who will never get old and he decides to make a difference. In addition to being responsible for the virality of the IBC, he is also a passionate advocate for people living with MND. Amazing energy and positivity and what a fitting champion for the IBC.
- Looking at another reason behind the success of the IBC – simplicity. I’ve coined this phrase “simple enough that even nuns in a convent can do it”. All you needed was a bucket, water, ice, a phone and social media. And how much fun was it to watch celebrities, friends, the IBC fails, communities, crazies. People loved it because it was fun and engaging, and I think that was really important for such a devastating disease like MND. It made the disease less confronting. Importantly part of what made the Ice Bucket Challenge go viral was the element of “gamification”, which refers to the addition of game elements. In this case, the challenge itself was a simple truth-or-dare type mechanism: either take the ice water on the head or donate to charity. What does it reveal when someone is nominated but refuses to take the challenge? I’ve watched 100s of IBC videos and this one is my absolute favourite. These beautiful Irish nuns had the best time and are simply delightful. Google Redemptoristine nuns IBC to take a look.
- This is a neat video that shows the spread of the Ice Bucket Challenge during August 2014. Starting in Boston and NY, then Europe, Australia started on the 10th. That’s another reason for the exponential growth of the campaign. The call to action was to nominate three people, which caused a snowballing effect that swept across the globe.
- There are around 2.5 million Ice Bucket Challenge videos floating around on Facebook, and when we’re talking these massive numbers, of course some people were more committed than others. But there can be no denying that the Ice Bucket Challenge generated interest, curiosity and funds. In 2014, Global searches for ALS and MND topped 90 million and put these search terms in the top ten list. In Australia 60,000 donors donated more than $3 million to MND Australia and our members, the State MND Associations. We’ve picked up more than 5,000 new subscribers. Our web traffic went up and hasn’t come back down with traffic being about double what it was for the same period a year before. Not as committed And a funny aside. During the Ice Bucket Challenge we had a talent agency call to say that they had famous clients who wanted to do the Ice Bucket Challenge so they needed information about how to get involved. So perhaps they weren’t doing it for the “righteous” reasons, but for what the Ice Bucket Challenge has given us, I’ll take a little bit of slacktivism and narcissism any day. Support an issue or social cause involving virtually no effort on the part of participants.
- So we’ve seen how the campaign began to grow and to be honest in the early days we saw articles popping up on Google about sports people taking the Ice Bucket Challenge but we were really skeptical. How could something so crazy amount to anything? And then on 10 August Rod Harris, CEO of MND Victoria was the first person in Australia to do the Challenge and a week later we had lift off in Australia. To set the scene, imagine our small staff in a tiny office that measures around (3.5 x 4m). The phone rang constantly with people wanting to make donations, people wanting to reverse donations when they gave $2000 rather than $20 dollars, media calls, people wanting information on how to take the Challenge (sometimes ringing at 10 o’clock at night!), people wanting to tell there story. It was a tidal wave or activity, so there was really no time to come up with anything new. The best we could do was to play it safe, swim between the flags and use our existing communication tools to stay afloat and leverage from the Ice Bucket Challenge.
- It’s kind of Comms 101, but we were thankful to have an up-to-date communications plan when the Ice Bucket Challenge arrived. During that time we had so much happening that there was no time to think about who we are and what we stand for. That’s where this page in particular came in handy. It’s a single page of key messages that articulates our position, vision, taglines, value proposition, and outlines our stakeholders and what matters to them. This page is a great help for spokespeople to keep them focused when speaking with the media, a bit like a communications security blanket. Wherever possible we also incorporate these messages in other forms of communication including social media so that each piece of communication reiterates our brand. The template for our communication plan came from Lee Hopkins who presented a Connecting Up webinar back in 2012 when I first joined MND Australia. At that point we didn’t have a proper plan, so Lee’s template was a great place to start. If your organisation doesn’t have a communications plan, you’ll find lots of templates on the internet, but I’d recommend visiting the Connecting Up site searching for Lee’s presentation to get started.
- So, let me make it clear that I’m not being paid by Connecting Up, but I just wanted to quickly outline how the Connecting Up Conference in 2013 helped us prepare for the Ice Bucket Challenge. At the time of the conference I had been at MND Australia for about 6 months, which was my first paid position in the not-for-profit sector. I was really inspired by so many of the ideas coming out of the conference, but of course there was no way we had the budget of resources to do everything. So I chose four things to implement. Doing more, spending less – at the 2013 Conference I first heard about Freelancer, the website to allows organisations to access talent from across the globe. We used Freelancer to find a designer for our 2014 MND Week marketing collateral. I’ll be honest, most of the proposals were terrible, but we did find one designer who got it and has continued to provide design services at a very reasonable price. Although we don’t have a huge budget, we endeavour to make whatever we do look professional. Freelancer allowed us to do that and gave us a professional face for the thousands of new visitors to our website. Must be mobile – at the time of the 2013 Conference we were in the middle of recreating our website, which was a mammoth task. After hearing of the importance of mobile optimised websites, we decided we had to have a mobile site as well. Thanks to funding from the Commonwealth Bank we launched our mobile site in May 2014, which handled around 40% of our online traffic and donations during the Ice Bucket Challenge. Email in king – at the 2013 Conference I heard about the effectiveness of email as a means of communication so from September 2013 we have issued a bimonthly newsletter to subscribers. During the frantic Ice Bucket Challenge is was a great benefit to have that email system in place, so we didn’t have to think about how to go about setting up email communication. We had the template in place and could quickly generate emails to thank donors and inform them of how their donations would be spent. Finally, storytelling. We know from the conversation that it generates on Facebook that storytelling is a powerful engagement tool in the MND community. I’ve long wanted to set up a repository of MND stories, but that’s still a project in progress. Something to do when we find time. So I hope that this has shown you how a tiny not-for-profit can take small steps to build communications platforms and collateral over time.
- The MND community is a very engaged, passionate mob. And this slide is an example of how the Ice Bucket Challenge mobilised an army of advocates. So no matter how hard we worked, there was no way that our team could keep up with all things Ice Bucket Challenge. This exchange is from MND Australia’s Facebook page. And the beautiful thing is that it was quickly resolved without a need for MND Australia’s intervention. Let’s take a closer look…
- We were so fortunate that the Ice Bucket Challenge did not happen 12 months earlier. If it had, we would have missed out on a once in a lifetime opportunity because our website was neglected, out-of-date with inadequate functionality to handle donations. Thankfully we had made our website a priority and had spent a moderate amount of money and a significant amount of time in its redesign in 2013. So when the Ice Bucket Challenge hit, from an online point of view, we were ready and our website performed magnificently. We had an up-to-date, professional looking website and mobile optimised site that included a PayPal giving option on the donation form. At the Challenge’s peak, there were 40,000 web sessions and in one 24-hour period alone, over $200,000 in donations flowed in.
- This is a busy timeline that summarises Ice Bucket Challenge traffic and our response during the first month and busiest month of the Challenge.
- And as I’ve just mentioned, MND Australia’s role as the peak body and national provider of trusted information meant that we worked hard to inform our stakeholders, correct misinformation, and at all times we tried to keep the community informed as to how their donations would be spent. Our FAQs page addressed provided really fundamental information about what MND Australia does for our new audience and also tried to clarify the inconsistency of the names … ALS is MND. We kept an eye out for issues arising in the US and addressed them before they became issues in Australia. Things like our position on stem cell research and animal testing, our budget, how much we spend on research, and how we planned to allocate the millions of dollars flowing into the organisation. We wanted a voice of authority to thank donors and reassure them that their donation would be wisely spend, so we filmed a short message from our President David Ali. We used our email template to thank our burgeoning subscriber group and keep them informed. BTW our subscriber list grew from around 900 to around 6000. And an excerpt from a media release. One think I found was that the media jumped on board initially and were keen to cover the fun, social media phenomenon. But as the media does, they quickly moved on so despite our best efforts to tell the story with a different angle and more serious angle, after a couple of weeks we were receiving feedback from the media that they had already covered the Ice Bucket Challenge.
- It’s almost a year since the Ice Bucket Challenge and things for MND Australia have not slowed. It has provided a boost to the MND community and been the impetus behind several new awareness campaigns and collaborations that are keeping up the momentum and heightening MND awareness like never before. We have been able to run our first national awareness campaign to span TV and radio. This has been initiated by Bernice Atlee who is living with MND and felt inspired to continue the momentum of the Challenge by supporting MND research. She contacted us and has been instrumental in using her connections to recruit pro bono support from creative and mainstream media agencies whose expert skills we would not have been able to afford. Our website traffic continues to be around double what it was pre-Ice Bucket Challenge. More people want to fundraise, the fundraising and not-for-profit sectors have invited us to tell our story. We have more social media activity, more people wanting to offer in-kind support. So not a day goes by when we are not grateful to Pat Quinn and Pete Frates for starting this social media tsunami for MND.
- But most importantly the Ice Bucket Challenge has given them a voice and hope that one day the world will be without MND. Final tweets from the MND community.