BOTTLE's social media experts support charity Pracitical Action with online PR campaign
With 2012 being the
Year of Sustainable Energy for All and the Rio20+ Earth Summit being key to changing Government Policy, international development charity Practical Action needed a wave of awareness and support from across the digital and tech communities to help ensure that the issue of energy access was high on the agenda. After initial consultation, the resultant
online PR campaign delivered a reach across social media in the millions.
With a limited budget,
BOTTLE devised a process-driven campaign aimed at delivering on a number of core KPIs. A number of evaluation mechanisms focused on interactions across social networks, blogs and websites were tightly integrated into a rugged monitoring and outreach process. Content from a number of different activities, including a collaborative visit to Kenya by UN Ambassador Gisele Bundchen, the release of a major report by Practical Action called The Poor People’s Energy Outlook, an associated webinar and an online graphical petition called Make Your Point, were pushed through Practical Action’s social profiles and to bloggers, while the disparate campaign elements were tied together using the concept of ‘Technology Justice’.
The organisation wanted to use social media to increase its brand awareness among the tech and renewable energy online communities, establish itself as a leading authority in using technology to tackle poverty, and engage influencers in order to develop evangelists and scale up its work. In just three months we achieved over 100 articles of mentions on blogs, websites and forums, including Forbes, National Geographic, Mashable, The Independent online and MSN.
Over 50 topic-relevant commenting opportunities were identified, and over 3600 identified social network interactions about Practical Action’s work were identified, in addition to over 20,000 views of the organisation’s Flickr and YouTube profiles. The engagement rate on Practical Action’s Facebook page more than doubled, while nearly 200 people registered to attend a topic-specific webinar. The estimated total reach for the campaign was around 2 million people in just three months.