Campaign Watch – Ice Bucket Challenge
in News
Over the summer you would have seen countless individuals dumping a bucket of ice over their heads all in support of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) including celebrities such as Victoria Beckham, Taylor Swift, Mark Zuckerberg and Oprah Winfrey.
The PR campaign raised an estimated £60m for the ALS – its British equivalent, the Motor Neurone Disease Association (MND) also benefitted – and raised awareness in the two months it spread via social media channels.
The format was simple – somebody has water, often filled with ice cubes, dumped over their head. Then they nominate people they know to undertake the same challenge.
There was in excess of 2.4m ice bucket related videos posted on Facebook; with 28 million people having uploaded, commented or liked an ice buket related post. On image sharing website Instagram there was 3.7m videos uploaded using the hashtags #ALSicebucketchallenge and #icebucketchallenge.
On August 29th the ice bucket challenge had 4,483,726 Twitter mentions with the number of ALS followers increasing to 22,000 and MND followers increasing to over 8,000 by the end of the campaign.
It’s certainly fair to say the campaign raised awareness of the Associations and the disease however do these social media driven campaigns give charities the long-term engagement from potential supporters?
Any social media campaign has a life of their own – No one owns them, so the results will always be unpredictable in terms of who it reaches, where and how long for.
Think of the impact Stephen Sutton made through his Facebook campaign ‘Stephen’s Story’. Despite the very sad circumstances surround the campaign, Stephen focused on the positives – spreading kindness and inspiring people top stop, listen and support – and to date has raised an incredible £5m for Teenage Cancer Research.
Non-social media campaigns such as Cancer Research UK’s Race for Life is a great example of how an annual event can secure legacy income for a chairty with an ever growing interest from participants.
Head of campaiging at London-based PR agency FOUR Communications Miriam Laverick, points out that when it comes to raising the profile of ALS and the ALS Association, this campaign has been a siginificant achievement.
She said: “They have had way more than their 15 minues of fame. Charities campaigning on diseases like cancer are awlays going to have a bigger presence in people’s lives, so to cut through into the public eye and become part of everyday conversation in this way is a big success! You could even argue that media critical of the campaign have contributed to raising awareness of a diseases that people knew little about beforehand.” (Guardian.co.uk).
Only time will be able to tell whether the ALS Association can convert their successful viral campaign into one that generated positive, long-term support however if only a small proportion of those who engaged with this charity continue to do so on a deeper level it would appear the campaign most definitely did its job.
