Using Social Media for a Good Cause

I recently emailed a lot of charities (around 20) offering free SEO services, I’m not sure if my pitch was poor but I only received one response, even though I explained there was definitely no catch and that we just wanted to do some good in the internet marketing world.

I actually received the response on the 1st of December (last saturday) which for those who don’t know, was World Aids Day. Here is how it looked:

We are an AIDS charity, tomorrow is World AIDS Day, and we have just put on Myspace, Youtube,

and on the AVERT website, www.avert.org, a new video about preventing babies dying of AIDS.

But we have no marketing capacity, as we are a small charity, and we now have to get people to watch the video.

Any help you could give us would be greatly appreciated.

You can get to the video from the home page of www.avert.org.

Thanks for the offer of help anyway.

Regards,

Annabel Kanabus

Director

It was a saturday, and I was about to go out, but I certainly wanted to help a good cause, especially for an issue that is so big in this country (South Africa) so I delayed my plans. Sure enough I found the video the email was regarding, and then I sent it to all my friends on stumbleupon (over 100) so as you can imagine this took quite a while.

When I first watched it I found it pretty special, and it was clear a lot of hard work had gone into it, but at only 214 views it certainly wasn’t getting the attention it deserved. Now the video sits at 3,404 views, more than 15 times the amount of views it had before we sent it around stumbleupon, but that certainly wasn’t the only traffic driver.

Michael Martine (who writes a great blog you should check out) was kind enough to also post the video on his popular video blog which has over 1700 subscribers, I never asked for this but he did it anyway. After letting Avert know the good news they told us that a lot more people had signed up to their aids campaign, and no matter how many views a video gets, as long as it produced some results that is what matters in my eyes, this also ended with a kind email:

Hi Glen,

Thanks very much for your help with this. We have very little experience promoting videos so your assistance is much appreciated.

The views on YouTube are now over 3,000, which we’re very happy with.

Kind regards,

Rob Noble, AVERT (replying in place of Annabel, who is in Africa)

If everyone of those 20 charities had of gotten back to me, I would have done 20 different 5-7 page reports for them free, it’s nice to know that we can use our ‘power accounts’ on popular social media websites to really make a difference. Thanks to all those who thumbed up the videos and for those who signed up to the campaign.