Habitat for Humanity International World Habitat Day Case Study

Challenge: To raise the profile of World Habitat Day online.

World Habitat Day is held on the first Monday of October every year. The theme of the October 2009 event was “Planning Our Urban Future” which tried to raise awareness of the need to improve urban planning in communities all over the world. We were tasked with helping Habitat for Humanity raise the online profile of World Habitat Day to encourage advocacy, foster education and increase donations

Strategy/Tactics: Leverage the influence of bloggers in target demographics to increase coverage of World Habitat Day.

We reached out to over 2,600 bloggers covering topics relevant to urban planning and humanitarian aid.

To better equip each blogger with special content relating to World Habitat Day, the team created a social media news release including embeddable pictures, videos, banner ads, and message copy that bloggers could paste into their blogs.

The purpose of the blogger outreach was to earn bloggers’ support and encourage them to act as amplifiers of the World Habitat Day message motivating readers to become involved in the effort.

Results: Drastically increased the amount of online coverage for the event over 635% from the previous year – 31 articles to 228 articles.

With a boost from our extensive blogger outreach in September, online coverage of World Habitat Day 2009 increased 635% from the previous year. 

Those 228 earned blog posts resulted in an estimated 1+ million impressions and boosted SEO results.

Testimonial: “On behalf of Habitat for Humanity International (HFHI), thank you for your company’s pro bono work on World Habitat Day blogger outreach during the fall of 2009. We were astounded by the results achieved by Chris Abraham and his team, and we appreciated your donation of staff time and resources.”

- Colleen Fitzgerald, Director of Advocacy Implementation, Habitat for Humanity International