An effective campaign that activates followers to serve as social media ambassadors for your organization takes more than a great idea. With the right communications person involved in the strategy and ideation of such an activation, high engagement, reach and traffic is achievable.
Influencer Strategy
Conversion Generation
Audience Engagement
Advocate activation
Whether you are trying to activate influencer marketing for a product or activate advocates for a fundraising campaign, an intentional and thoughtful approach is needed for maximizing this group's reach.
At Seton Hall University, I led the communications strategy for the University’s 2019 Giving Day, a philanthropic campaign.
My Giving Day communications plan included specific incentives and specialized support to increase the conversion rate of the campaign’s advocates as a tactic for reaching the campaign's donor goal.
The 2019 Giving Day resulted in
37 advocates raising $8,000 collectively in just 36 hours, a 70% increase in dollars raised by advocates compared to 2018 when the same campaign recruited 66 advocates who collectively raised less than $2400.
Below, you can see examples of advocate content populating #SetonHallGivingDay.
“The more ambassadors, the better.” Well, that isn’t exactly true. This campaign’s result of less advocates but more dollars compared to the year before is because my activation strategy focused on maximizing the potential reach of our advocates vs. recruiting a large number of advocate sign-ups. This strategy didn’t focus on rewarding Seton Hall's community for answering the call to sign-up, it used a tiered approach to create enthusiasm and reward those who took trackable action on the campaign.
Those who shared the campaign to their channels would gain points toward sweepstake entries to win cool branded gear. Those who posted a video sharing the campaign's message would gain points toward sweepstake entries and be entered to win a $100 Amazon gift card. Lastly, those who were able to recruit 5 or more others to make a gift to the campaign using their unique influencer link would be able to unlock a $500 contribution toward the area of the university that mattered most to them, plus be entered to win a $400 Visa gift card for themselves.
In addition to tiered rewards, my influencer/advocate activation strategy provided advocates with content and content ideas for posting as well as educational materials to ensure they felt well-prepared to champion the campaign.
Below you will see the "how-to" video sent to the community to inspire advocate sign-ups as well as the advocate toolkit.
The success of any activation strategy is as dependent upon the idea as it is the execution planning and process. My organization and use of available tools allowed my team and I to maintain a holistic view of all outgoing campaign content at all times. I used TeamUp technology to create an integrated editorial content calendar that tracked and color coded each outgoing message, its target audience, and scheduled date and time.
*Below is an example of what a content calendar for a campaign may look like on TeamUp.
