During the immediate aftermath of a disaster, emergency-relief organizations experience a surge in donations thanks to extensive coverage in the media. But what happens to disaster victims who are still in need after the media spotlight disappears and the donations come to a halt?
On April 25th, 2015, a devastating earthquake struck Nepal killing over 8,000 people. A year later, tens of thousands of Nepalese are still seeking aid and living in unsafe shelters due to political turmoil. With a tiny but skilled marketing team and freelance videographers, All Hands Volunteers ran an multi-channel integrated campaign on a shoestring budget to fundraise for the rebuilding of homes and schools for affected families. They launched the campaign on the one year anniversary of the Nepal earthquake and raised $112,000 in donations in two weeks.
To raise donations and promote awareness for Nepal, All Hands Volunteers launched an online and offline campaign on the one year anniversary of the earthquake.
The centerpiece of the campaign is a dedicated landing page that effectively asks for donations while highlighting our progress and stories. To drive traffic to the landing page, we created 10 social media posts that were launched across our social platforms.
Storytelling: To humanize the disaster and the people we're helping in Nepal, we created a Voices of Nepal series that captures the stories of victims of the earthquake who lost their homes and loved ones along with the stories of volunteers who helped rebuild their homes.
Infographic: To celebrate our progress of building 100 homes, we created an infographic to show the amount of volunteer hours and materials it took to build these homes.
Partnerships: Our partners are not only a vital part of our recovery programs, but also a key factor in the success of our campaign. Our partners such as Google, Serengetee, Reach Out Worldwide, and Airbnb promoted our campaign by sharing internally and with their social media followers.
Curated Content Creation: In partnership with Airbnb, we created a customized blog post about how they provided accommodation through an Airbnb host for our disaster response team. Airbnb shared it on 3 of their Facebook and Twitter accounts that have a total of 555,000 followers.
Everest Challenge: To ensure a stable source of donations, we created a fundraising challenge on social media that invited 20 participants to trek 12 days to Everest Basecamp in Nepal. The fundraising challenge raised over $72,000.
Sponsored Posts: Through targeted Facebook ads, we reached an additional 410,000 users and generated 42,000 paid views for our Voices of Nepal videos.
All Hands Volunteers exceeded donation goals and raised over $191,000 in two weeks thanks to a generous 100% donation match from its founder, David Campbell. The donations will directly fund the construction of several schools in the Nuwakot District of Nepal.
As an NGO with a small social media following (under 50K followers on Facebook), the campaign was a success in terms of social engagement. We reached 520,000 users on Facebook, generated 55,000 video views, 533 shares, and 22,000 post likes. We organically increased our Facebook followers by 1397 in two weeks, which is 142% higher than average. Overall, the campaign helped us reach our primary goal of rebuilding more homes and schools in Nepal and also increased our brand awareness along the way.
