Top Five Extraordinary Social Media Campaigns In The Last Five Years

1.)  Epic Change's Epic Thanks/TweetsGiving Campaign - Originally named TweetsGiving in 2008, Epic Thanks was one of the first campaigns to successfully harness the power of Twitter for social good.  The campaign, run by Epic Change, inspired a global network of people to donate in honour of whatever they were grateful for.  

     First, it asked that people tweet (a Twitter message) out anything they were thankful for and include the #TweetsGiving tag and a link to the site. Second, the project asked for a donation in honor of whatever you were grateful for. These donations, done through PayPal, allowed you to buy a brick in the new classroom for $10 or become a “Top Turkey” for $100. And third, it asked that you follow @TweetsGiving on Twitter and help spread the word through other means (blogging, Facebook, etc.).  

     The result within the first year was $11,000.00 raised; which ended up funding the construction of a classroom at Sheperd's Primary School in Arusha, Tanzania.  Five years later, the project has drawn in over $100,000.00 to fund the addition of multiple classrooms and facilities at both Sheperd's Primary and Secondary Schools.  98% of donors had never donated to Epic Change before. 

     

2.)  American Red Cross "Haiti" Earthquake Relief Texting Campaign - Within hours of the devastating earthquake in Haiti, on January 12th, 2010, with the help of the U.S. wireless industry and viral awareness, American Red Cross launched a campaign that raised $32MM (million) from over three million donors who gave $10.00 pert text of the word "Haiti".  

     Though this wasn't Red Cross' first cellphone fundraising campaign, this time they hit a peak of $500,000.00 raised in one hour!  Furthermore, Red Cross attributes nearly half (41%) of the donations to those under 34 years of age, which represents a new and much younger donor share.  Furthermore, 95% of the people who texted in to the Haiti campaign were first-time donors to the American Red Cross.

3.)  Global conservation organization The Nature Conservancy's social media strategy is to find where people spend time on line and engage them in those places.  

     In 2008 they teamed up with a Facebook application developer to create '(Lil) Green Patch', which enables Facebook users to plant gardens and send plants to one another; and for every ten plants given various sponsors will donate to the Nature Conservancy's Adopt an Acre program to protect one square foot of rainforest in Costa Rica.  So far, the application ranks amongst the top five most popular applications on Facebook - it currently has about 6.3 million users - and has saved over 70 million square feet of rainforest. 

4.)  The Nonprofit Technology Network (NTEN) used several social networking outlets to raise their goal of $10K; which would help finance the way for some attendees to the 2009 annual Nonprofit Technology Conference:

    Their online presence included using blip.tv.com to host a promotional video (which has since been removed), Convio for matching donations up to their $10K goal, and Twitter shout-out from author Beth Kanter to help promote their 'Donate Airline Miles' initiative to help fly in attendees to the conference.

     Arguably, the most effective endeavour of their campaign was NTEN's Executive Director Holly Ross' commitment to perform one of three potentially embarrassing dares that donours would vote on when their fundraising goal was reached.  The result, a remake of Beyonce's "Single Ladies (Put A Ring On It)" video*, was played on two thirty foot screens at the crowded 2009 Conference. At the end of it, she received a standing ovation.  *Unfortunately, the video cannot be viewed online in Canada.

Speakers at the conference included:

Grand Junction Design's Margaux O'Malley, on strategies for redesigning and streamlining the website of non-profit "The Hunger Project".

NetSquared's Global Community Builder, Amy Sample Ward, on empowering local communities with innovative solutions to their community problems. 

5.) Charity: Water's 2009 TWESTVAL event raised over $250K USD from 10,000 new donours and their FACEBOOK Cause Page raised over $100K USD in order to fund their mission:

"We travel the world to find inspiring organizations who are providing long-lasting water and sanitation services, and then we fund their most successful programs. Our goal isn't just to get water flowing, but to make sure it flows for many years."

Source: (http://sumac.com/social-media-campaigns/)