On the Edge Campaign of the Year: SCO Family of Services

GOLD AWARD
SCO Family of Services
Lady Gaga and Robin Hood Foundation Contest
Submitted by Big Duck

The Numbers
Number of Recipients: 5,000 of SCO’s
list/followers
Total Cost: $11,514.75
Income Generated: $500,000
Cost to Raise a Dollar: $0.02

It’s a pretty safe bet that anything involving Mother Monster is going to be pretty edgy. So it’s appropriate that this campaign presented and overcame logistical hurdles well beyond the scope of a more traditional fundraising campaign. During a two-week stretch in May 2011, SCO was one of five organizations up for a chance to win a combined total of $1 million. The challenge was to get people to vote for SCO through Lady Gaga’s Facebook page.

The hurdles: Time wasn’t exactly on the competitors’ side, and SCO had to focus on galvanizing support through a communications channel it had not fully explored up to that point.

Some of the winning strategies included giving SCO staffers (who were not allowed to vote) simple, step-by-step instructions on sharing the contest with supporters, family members and friends who could vote; developing a plan for Facebook promotions, including customizing the organization’s page to focus on the campaign and providing SCO staff with a plan to keep supporters interested through relevant and engaging posts; and finally a virtual vote-a-thon Facebook event.

SCO featured the contest on its website, produced a video about it and sent e-mails asking supporters to help spread the word, including easily customizable social-media messages to make sharing as easy as possible.

In the end, SCO got more than 400,000 of the total million votes cast and won the top $500,000 prize.

Our judges liked the moxie that SCO and Big Duck showed in really honing in on the power of peer-to-peer communications to win the contest.

“As the campaign came to an end, SCO’s staff had gained a strong sense of what it takes for success with social media, developing capacity for future efforts,” Big Duck’s Farra Trompeter explained.