My roommate Caila and I chose to work with a non-profit organization called Boarding for Breast Cancer (B4BC) last semester for Elaine Young's Non-Profit and Social Marketing Class. We learned a lot about the organization through starting a Student Ambassador program on the Champlain College campus. We put together a table event outside the cafeteria to reach out and give student information about the importance of early detection and even had a presence at some on snow events such as the Battle for Burlington at Jay Peak. At that point in the project, we had started a group on Facebook that had about 50 or so members. We added our close friends and those from the area that we knew had an interest in snowboarding. We really let the group go during the summer, I don't think it saw a single update... until recently.
We decided to continue working for the non-profit and figured that since October is national breast cancer awareness month, we wanted to hold some sort of awareness event event on campus to start spreading the word again. We contacted Joe, president of the Ski & Ride Club and he was just as stoked on the idea as we were. We decided to throw a movie premiere for the new Burton B Movie and also spend some time educating about B4BC. Now is where the fun part came in, spreading the word. We had two weeks to get as many people aware of this event as possible and we took many ways of doing that. We first used our already made Facebook group to make an "event page". This way we already had a solid number of people to invite, people who already knew what the non-profit was about. These people are our leaders, they will be the ones to essentially start the viral marketing campaign and get people talking. Next thing we knew, as friends began electronically inviting there friends, 71 people and counting have said they will be attending.
I could even post pictures right to the group of physical flyers and posters we had thrown up around campus. How cool is that? Being able to relate one thing you see while walking around campus to another on the Internet that even allows you to find out more information.
The next few things that happened were awesome thanks to Twitter. Of course Caila and I put it up on Twitter with a hashtag here and there explaining the event and even attaching Bit.Ly links to the posters with more information. Next thing we know not only is the Ski & Ride Club re tweeting about it but a well followed shred mag called East Coast Snowboarding, Burton Snowboards and the organization itself are as well. We couldn't possibly reach out to all those followers on our own so it was great to see Twitter being used the way I believe it is meant to be used.
It gets better. The national organization gave us a shout out on their homepage.
So did East Coast Snowboarding who just launched a new version of their website today (10/28) and included our event on their main billing, this received 2000 hits in just one hour. Oh, I love you Web 2.0. Thanks everyone!
Here's the "basic" teaser for Burton's 09/10 Snowboard movie, The B
