Say you’re a business or organization that needs to get the word out about an important initiative, and the success of said initiative is totally dependent on how you can activate your community to support you. What do you do?
While the following advice isn’t a magic formula that will work in every instance, here are three things you could do to accomplish the above goal:
- Tap into your already developed network of customers/clients/supporters/advocates, and motivate and inspire them to act.
- Spoon feed the info to your community, meaning you need to tell them exactly what you need them to do.
- Utilize social media.
Now, I realize the first bullet means you need to have already created raving fans of your business or organization. Hopefully, you have! And if you haven’t, then it’s time to take a step back and figure out how to make the people you’re trying to reach love your company/organization so much that they become natural brand ambassadors. That’s another topic for another day.
Friendship Circle is an organization that does an amazing job of the three things I outlined above. Friendship Circle is a nonprofit organization that provides programs and support to the families of individuals with special needs at more than 80 worldwide locations. Bassie Shemtov and her team at Friendship Circle in metro Detroit are some of the most passionate, creative and all-around awesome people I’ve ever met. The network of supporters and advocates they have created over the years is truly astounding.
When they were in the running to win $1 million dollars from the Chase Community Giving Campaign, they put together a super smart strategy that followed the three-pronged approach I discussed above:
- They inspired their loyal community to vote and to get people in their extended networks to vote.
- They spoon-fed the info to them to make it really easy for them to help Friendship Circle win (things like telling them exactly what to say in tweets and Facebook posts and creating badges they could put on their websites and blogs).
- They heavily utilized their own social channels and reached out to influencers in the Jewish community through social media to get them on the voting bandwagon.
Friendship Circle ended up coming in fourth place and winning (if memory serves me right) $25,000. So, not quite the $1 million, but still very impressive.
I always use Friendship Circle as a case study when I’m talking to companies about the importance of building a community of passionate supporters, both online and offline, before you actually need something from them. Imagine if Friendship Circle didn’t have that passionate community already established, or a strong presence on social channels, before they attempted to win the $1 million from Chase. Think their campaign would have been as successful if they were trying to activate people who knew a whole lot of nothing about them? Definitely not.
Hopefully you can take a few cues from Friendship Circle and think about how you can apply these concepts to your own organization and business.
Side note: A very cool documentary about Friendship Circle called The Circle Never Ends is debuting on metro Detroit’s ABC affiliate, WXYZ Channel 7, on September 23. If you live in the area, I encourage you to watch it to learn more about Friendship Circle and how they create important bonds and friendships between people with special needs and the community at large. See all those calls to action on the documentary’s landing page? So smart.
Kudos to you, Friendship Circle! Keep doing what you’re doing and inspiring others to follow a similar path to success.
Disclosure: I worked with Friendship Circle on a pro-bono project through my agency, Identity. in 2010. While I provided some pro-bono consulting to them on their documentary campaign, I was not compensated in any way to write this post. I simply love the work they do and think others could and should learn from their success.