Objectives

In honor of Mother’s Day 2011, EngenderHealth launched an interactive online fundraising campaign, inviting people to “plant a flower" in a virtual garden, in honor of a special mother. For every flower planted, a generous donor gave $5 to support EngenderHealth’s global programs to improve maternal health care and save mothers’ lives. The planter was given the option of adding a personalized message for the honoree.We are a small Communications and Marketing team at a global nonprofit working to improve reproductive health for women and men around the world. The “Plant-a-Flower" campaign combined a fun, personalized Mother’s Day activity with the benefits of doing global “social good." Our use of Twitter (and other social media “share" features) in the campaign successfully leveraged every action taken by participants to help us reach a broader audience, including the personal social networks of each participant. Each planted flower was assigned a unique URL. Every time someone planted a flower, he or she had the option of posting a feed story to his or her Twitter or Facebook account, or to forward the campaign to friends, using a customizable message such as: “I just planted a flower and gave $5 to save mothers’ lives! @EngenderHealth." Because of the sharing features, some tribute flowers were viewed as many as 378 times via Twitter and Facebook links. In total, the campaign was live for about 5-6 business days. During this time, the campaign inspired participants to plant nearly 1,000 virtual flowers and raised more than $11,000 in total donations for EngenderHealth’s maternal health programs. It also garnered more than 100 new subscribers/supporters for the organization. Altogether, the flowers in the virtual garden were viewed close to 9,000 times.

Strategy and Execution

http://www.engenderhealth.org/mothersday/

Media