Bloggers are a unique breed. They are hard working, have extremely high ethics and can sniff out BS better than Columbo.
This is precisely why conducting a blogger outreach campaign can be the most difficult type of social media campaign.
CTK Techknowledge, a nonprofit software company, contacted me to develop and execute a strategy to promote their Heart & Soul Grant to potential applicants.
Part of the strategy included reaching out to bloggers in the nonprofit space in hopes that they’d write a blog post about the grant.
Results
Our goal for this part of the campaign was 30 blog posts. We ended up with 142 blog posts that sent over 5,000 visits to the Heart & Soul Grant application page. 1,552 organizations submitted applications.
How we did it
There we three factors that contributed to the overwhelming success of this campaign:
- Inspire participation with incentive – Bloggers get approached all the time to blog about a product or cause. The last thing we wanted to do was to be another beggar. We knew that in order to overcome this challenge, we had to offer an incentive that would be way more compelling than an iTunes card or Amazon gift certificate (yawn). Knowing that nonprofit bloggers are change-makers who prefer direct participation in changing the world, we created the “Bloggers Choice” award. Here’s how it worked:
*One of the participating bloggers would be randomly chosen to hand-pick one of the applicants.
*The chosen applicant would get $1,000.
This incentive gave participating bloggers a chance to look like a complete rock-star to their readers and peers! They would also receive a few mentions on the CTK website, Facebook Page and Twitter feed. - Turn heads with trending – We told participating bloggers to publish their blog post on March 1st at 2:00PM (EST). This specific constraint was critical in creating a trending effect among the nonprofit blogging community. There were only 39 bloggers that we were able to personally enlist, so we had to trend their posts in order to get more bloggers to participate. An additional 103 bloggers participated throughout March. If allowed the initial 39 bloggers to publish anytime in March, we wouldn’t have turned the other 103 heads.
- Unify with an awesome team – The stars of the this whole effort were Juan Garcia and Justin Minsker (of CTK), JD Lasica (of SocialBrite.Org) and Deborah Finn (Strategic Techology Consultant). What they contributed was a lot of hard work, sincere belief in the Heart & Soul grant, and great people skills.
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Certainly an amazing blog post and lesson to learn. I do have a question to make it clear
“One of the participating bloggers would be randomly chosen to hand-pick one of the applicants.”
That does mean, you guys randomly pick a blogger, and the blogger will pick the winner for the $1,000?
Yes – that’s exactly what it meant.
Aaron – as the lucky blogger that was selected to give away the $1000 grant I can say that’s exactly how it worked.
John’s blogger outreach worked well for me. There were two reasons the campaign appealed – first, the novel approach from CTK in terms of a grant application. I can’t remember nonprofits being asked to submit a short poem as an application before.
Secondly, the prize of being able to make a grant of $1000 was both unusual and highly attractive. At least to me, who has spent his life as a fundraiser and not a grantmaker.
Thanks John for explaining the rationale for the blogger outreach campaign, and congratulations on the success.
Howard – Your experience is a great example of how bloggers should feel when approach as part of an outreach campaign.
John, thanks for the writeup. The first rule of campaigns is: You can’t promote something that isn’t genuine. Fortunately, the Heart & Soul campaign had a lot to offer the nonprofit community. I hope CTK Techknowledge continues its grant program in future years!
Great info. What hashtags or links were required as part of each post to make sure it trended on 3/1 at 2?
When I say trended, I don’t mean it was a top trend on twitter. I meant that it trended among the nonprofit blogging community.
When I say trended, I don’t mean it was a top trend on twitter. I meant that it trended among the nonprofit blogging community.
Great post about how you made this work, and thanks for sharing. I was talking with a colleague about it and hoping that one of you guys would do something like this.
As president of both Community TechKnowledge, Inc. and the CTK Foundation, I’d like to pipe up and say that the nonprofit selected by Howard Lake was “over the moon” about being chosen by a UK-based blogger for the $1,000 award (FYI: they heard about the opportunity on a blog). A representative of that nonprofit – the Prison Book Project, told me that the $1,000 award translates into much needed books sent to an additional 330 men and women in prison. Wow!
John, this was a unique and high-impact approach to getting the word out to nonprofits in six countries about an accessible grant opportunity. Bravo.
One final note: CTK interviewed Howard via skype and we played that interview at the recent Heart & Soul Awards Gala – everyone present very much enjoyed meeting Howard and hearing his story. We’ll be posting all interviews at http://www.communitytech.net/foundation in the next few days.
Your trending idea is absolutely fantastic.
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