By G+ Author: Erin Washington.
Social Media holds a lot of power in 2013 and is a great platform for non-profit organisations to spread their mission statement and generate hype around their goal. An example of how social media helped make a non-profits dream happen comes from Australia.
“Thankyou” is a social enterprise tapping into the already lucrative bottled water industry in Australia. In 2008 Thankyou’s co-founders, Daniel Flynn, Justine Flynn and Jarryd Burns were “struck by the injustice” that while Australians were spending $600 million annually on bottled water, young people in Africa were struggling to find safe drinking water daily. In attempt to rectify this, Thankyou Water set out to “join these two extremes together” by creating a bottled water company whose sole purpose is to provide funding for safe water projects in developing nations.
A few years later and Thankyou Water has become a three-tiered company with Thankyou Food and Thankyou Body Care being added in.
In July – Thankyou called on the two biggest supermarket chains in Australia, Coles and Woolworths, (with $32.07 billion and $54.3 billion in revenue respectively), to stock it’s range. The company utilised the power of social media, putting it to the people to prove why it would be a worthwhile addition to the supermarket shelves.
They started their campaign with a fully comprehensive, explanatory video explaining the “Thankyou” range, what it’s achieved and what it hopes to achieve – including the all important call to action.
The “Call to Actions” of the campaign were simple;
Firstly; They asked customers and consumers to post a comment or a 10 second video to the Coles and Woolworths Facebook pages, telling them that if they stocked it, they’d buy it. They also included the all important request for a tag, and included their custom hashtag, #colesandwoolworths in the instructions.
Secondly; they asked consumers and customers to share the launch video (above) across all their social media platforms to ensure maximum reach and engaement.
Thirdly; they went straight to the source. They asked people to send feedback forms (digitally and physically) requesting they stock the range.
Following all of this – Coles posted on their Facebook saying they were overwhelmed with the support and were looking forward to their meeting, receiving over 4,000 likes, 1800 comments and 124 shares.
A similar post by Woolworths received over 3,000 likes, nearly 2000 comments and 92 shares.
At the end of their two-week campaign, the launch video had received over 70,000 views on YouTube, and both Coles and Woolworths had said yes to stocking the Thank you range.
Utilising the power of social media, Thankyou was able to secure continued exposure to 75% of the Australian population, who do their grocery shopping at either Coles or Woolworths, numerous opportunities for exposure through mass media and all in only two weeks.