How can we create a purpose layer for the Pokemon Go phenomenon?
The first weekend Pokemon Go was released our team noticed a huge cultural shift. In parks around New York everyone was using the app and experiencing augmented reality for the first time. Why not challenge these people to play Pokemon Go with purpose? That's when we launched the Charity Miles Pokemon Go Challenge.
Charity Miles is a free social good app that enables our members to earn money for a cause they care about every time they move. Run, walk the dog, bike, and dance to earn money for over 30 world-class charities. It's funded by our amazing partners that sponsor each session.
Our goals
>Increase Charity Miles downloads.
>Encourage sharing from the app to advocate for charity partners and spread mission of moving for purpose.
We saw the rise in popularity of Pokémon Go with a bump in downloads of our own app.
We then created a challenge with hope that thousands of miles would be logged therefore thousands of lives impacted. At the same time raising awareness and advocacy for our charity partners.
We posted a blog and created social media marketing materials. We then sent out an email announcing the challenge followed with Facebook and Instagram posts and tweets. The key features of the challenge were to screen-shot your Pokemon Go adventure and share that image in Charity Miles after you completed a session. Our entire campaign was unpaid organic reach.
We wanted to put a clear game and structure around how people could participate to drive participation and engagement. Make it very easy for people to go out and do it. We also wanted it to be clear to our current and new members that you can just turn on Charity Miles put it in the background of your phone and get moving.
New Members- Increased 2,691% in the first week of the challenge. We saw a 1,231% over the month.
Surge in active members- Increase in daily active users by 246% in the first week. Over the next 30 days increased by 160%.
Social Impressions- First week 4.1M social impressions and over 16M for the month just from app shares.
Media Coverage- Over 50 media mentions world wide
We were blown away by the response from our community and the world. It well surpassed our goals and became the largest growth in the company's history.
