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Charity campaigning - just do it!

Fundraising | Liam Barrington-Bush | 31 Aug 2012

Liam Barrington-Bush is in favour of impromptu marketing campaign. It worked for More Like People Action Week, he says, and it could work for you.

So you're planning a day or a week to raise awareness or promote grassroots activism around your cause. What do you do? Prepare a proposal for senior management. Write a funding bid. Wait for weeks or months. If you get approved you start allocating roles, getting the press team briefed, submitting new web pages for approval...

If you go this route, you'll probably want to give yourself at least six months to get the whole thing up-and-running. However, you could also just start doing it. It's quicker, cheaper, and considerably improves the odds that those involved will be excited to make it happen.

That's how Paul Barasi and I launched the first 'More Like People Action Week' last week.

The idea was this: everyone does one thing to make their organisation a bit more human this week, and shares it online so others can also be inspired by it.

Paul Tweeted me the concept on Sunday afternoon. I was inspired by it and posted a blog about it that night. Then we shared it on Twitter.

Besides a handful of targeted Tweets to journalists and folks we knew would be interested, nothing about this week was 'promoted.'

Paul in London, me in Mexico, and a series of Tweets across time zones were basically all the ‘coordination’ that went into making it happen.

But it worked as an impromptu experiment, garnering multiple blogs in the UK national press within days!
Over 70 people took part on Twitter, Tweeting on the hashtag over 300 times, but more importantly, many of those Tweets (as well as blog comments) featured peoples' ideas and suggestions of little things they could do or were doing to make their workplaces a bit more human. In other words, an online experiment helped to catalyse ‘real world’ action, even if on an initially small scale!

I reckon between Paul and I, we put in a combined 40-hour week to nudge it along.

Retrospectively, if we’d started something on the Friday, we could have sent it out in a slightly more widespread way, but one of the big lessons for me was about the importance of running with enthusiasm.

Whatever extra plugging we might have achieved in the previous work week, may or may not have improved results, if it meant sitting on the idea a few more days before being able to really take action. Organisations are generally pretty poor at letting people run with something they feel passionate about. The result is too often that things get done on institutional timetables, long after the people doing them have lost their initial spark or motivation. The organisational resources lost in the process cannot be understated. Too often they are the difference between ‘acceptable’ and ‘amazing’ results.

More Like People Week, like other valuable efforts I’ve been involved in before, worked because those involved had nothing to stop us from finding a spark and running with it. While I believe in this as a more general principle, on social media this kind of autonomy is even more crucial, as passion and commitment are consistently key ingredients when Tweets, blogs, or ideas start to go viral.

So next time you’re thinking about going through the arduous organisational process described at the start of this piece, why not explore if there’s a ‘#MoreLikePeople’ way to put your idea into action first?

Who's Who: Liam Barrington-Bush