Project Goals: The United Way reaches out to major companies within the region to hold an internal fundraising campaign. The Knoxville News Sentinel was looking for an individual theme to effectively communicate their fundraising efforts to their employees. This was right when the economy took a turn, and they went from a healthy budget to execute this campaign, to having zero budget.
Our Solutions: Our strategy was to create a theme that was somewhat outlandish, utilizing relatively new channels: social media. At that point in time, greater social media was still relatively new. Twitter and Tumblr were less than a couple years old, and still not widely used by the masses. The fundraising theme we devised was to Capture Bigfoot, with reward money, with the eventual “winner” to be United Way of Greater Knoxville. We shot video of one of the employees in a Bigfoot costume, showing that “he” was seen around the building, posting the videos to Vimeo, and sending internal email blasts. We also created and printed “footprints,” placing them leading into employees’ cubicles. Through Twitter and Tumblr we posted historic newspaper records showcasing Bigfoot’s history. Every bit just took time and a little effort. The only real expense was the $100 Bigfoot costume.
Results: The initial expectation for the campaign was $70,000. We almost doubled that, raising over $130,000. Because of this exercise we were asked to speak at many United Way of Greater Knoxville meetings, in front of Loaned Executives and the serviced nonprofits to show them how to be use social media for fundraising and to best communicate their message.
