Raising Awareness for Your Cause - Nonprofit Blog Carnival

Welcome to this month’s edition of the Nonprofit Blog Carnival, a roundup of great blog posts on a topic of interest to the nonprofit community. Our topic is raising awareness, which was great timing with the Ice Bucket Challenge phenomena, so let’s start there.

The Ice Bucket Challenge

In addition to raising a mind-boggling amount of money ($94.3 million as of yesterday), it’s certainly raised awareness of ALS as a disease with millions. I blogged it about last week in Creating Your Nonprofit’s Version of the #IceBucketChallenge, where I broke down why the specifics of the challenge itself — the dumping of the ice — was brilliant.

I also liked the advice Gail Perry shared in How to Knock Off the Ice Bucket Challenge and Make Social Media Work for Your Cause, Beth Kanter shared in Ice Bucket Challenge: Can Other Nonprofit Reproduce It, and Ritu Sharma shared in Can Your Cause Catch Lightening in an Ice Bucket?

I’d skip the “bucket dumping on the head element” in anything you do now. It will only be clever for about another week. Here’s an example of dumping rubble to raise awareness in Gaza, and dumping bullets to raise awareness about the rising military police state — these are only getting attention because they are newsjacking the ALS challenge while it’s hot. A couple of months from now, this would just seem weird.

Planning Your Own Awareness Raising Campaigns

By looking at a few viral campaigns,Rachel Hope Allison explores a key ingredient for a successful multichannel campaign: a strong and enthusiastic foundation of supporters. From identifying and assessing that base, to determining the best way to reach and mobilize them, this piece provides insight into the steps a nonprofit should take before launching that game-changing campaign.

What’s the secret to designing and executing a successful online engagement campaign? Debra Askanase outlines the assets needed to launch and run a successful engagement campaign, timelines, elements of engagement campaigns, and two case studies. A comprehensive slide deck is included.

Amy DeVita shares 3 Lessons Nonprofits Can Learn from YouTubers. (Her kids, like mine, are obsessed with their favorite YouTubers, and indeed there are some great lessons to learn from them!)

Lance Leasure says that, just like the aimless road trip, pursuing “increased awareness” without an end goal in mind may take you places you never wanted to see and cost untold time and money.

Need to include “outreach” in a grant application? Jake Seliger offers some tips on designing outreach programs.

Adam Weinger shares ways to raise awareness with your donors about asking their employers to match donations to eligible nonprofit organizations.

Awareness Raising Case Studies

Big Duck did an awareness campaign for Sharsheret. Using brochures, posters, and a short video, this campaign aimed to inspire candid conversation between college-aged kids and their parents regarding family medical history. You can check out the case study here.

The Story of Stuff Project shows off some elements of a successful awareness raising campaign: showing people specific ways to fight a wrong (helping a town fight back against a corporation) and sharing “behind the scenes” storytelling from your staff (researching plastics in the ocean).

A Shot@Life is using Pinterest as part of its awareness raising campaign, described by Oh So Pinteresting.