Fresh Air Fund Case Study
Challenge: Help strengthen brand awareness, expand existing Fresh Air Fund community, and increase donations. The Fresh Air Fund has been a recognized and highly regarded organization for over 135 years, with an excellent presence in New York’s top publications. As the 21st century dawned a younger generation of counselors, parents, and donors emerged with a dropping interest in paper print and a growing interest in online media. The Fresh Air Fund had virtually no social media presence before we took on the task of designing an integrating social media strategy to strengthen brand awareness, expand existing communities and increase support of the organization. We focused on three goals for the Fresh Air Fund Campaign: recruiting hosts, recruiting counselors, and increasing donations.
Strategy/Tactics: Employ an integrated social media strategy using blogger outreach, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube to increase exposure. We launched 11 separate blogger outreach campaigns on behalf of the Fresh Air Fund. Each campaign was introduced with a topic-specific social media news release (i.e. hosts, counselors, etc.) to target bloggers who would share the information with their readers. Our blogger outreach strategy also included a number of novel campaigns including a "Thank You" outreach and a dollar for dollar donation match campaign. In addition to blogger outreach, We also helped develop profiles for Fresh Air Fund on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.
Results: Drastically increased brand awareness via online mentions and strengthened presence in social media. In the days following each blogger outreach campaign, social media monitoring showed consistent spikes in online conversations, with the largest spike occurring as a result of the dollar for dollar outreach. Over the course of a year, we helped drive the number of online mentions about Fresh Air Fund from 4,000 to 65,000 mentions. Our social media efforts garnered approximately 11 million impressions. Their Facebook profile grew from 400 to over 3,050 and their Twitter handle grew from 229 to over 8,000 followers. Their efforts in social media also boosted their Google SEO results in an order of magnitude, making them easier to find and more accessible to parents, counselors, and donors.