Special Feature: Results of Social Media Fundraising Campaign

Let’s be clear. Few people care about my personal Facebook status update. If I’m lucky, a small handful of my 595 Twitter followers will see a Tweet of mine. This is not a defeatist observation, it’s just the way it is.

In the first several minutes of The Social Network—just after the co-founders have completed Face Mash (the site that arguably inspired Facebook)—a big decision must be made: who do they send the site to in order to make the greatest impact? Then, the actor playing Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerburg turns to his partner and says, “The question is, who are they going to send it to?” Aha! The question may seem simple, but it is the backbone of any successful campaign that leverages the power of its users. Nobody cares about what you send out. It is not about you, after all. It is about the power of the group. Who are they going to send it to? So, what can you possibly do to get them to care?

On September 21^st, 2010 around 5pm a small group of Woolly staff members gathered spontaneously in the office kitchen for some casual late-in-the-workday searching of snacks or caffeinated beverages. I was there, along with Tim Plant our Director of Development and Jen Anthony, the Campaign Associate. As I cracked jokes about social media (as I like to do to ruffle feathers), nothing seemed out of the ordinary until Tim said to me, “Does anyone actually raise MONEY using social media?” A simple dare, and it was on.

It started small. I said, let me use the Size of the Gift platform that the devo department had already used during the run of In the Next Room or the vibrator play. The platform allowed users to customize their own webpages and email it to their friends asking that they donate to Woolly. My tactic would be that I would personalize it and send it out over social media, and only over social media. The bet bar started low.

Raise $100, Tim said. I scoffed. $500. And what would I get in exchange? The pay-off started internally. Have Tim bake you cookies. Bake the office cookies. I suggested that he wear something weird. It was Jen who suggested the I Heart Social Media t-shirt. Yes! But, $500? Seemed easy. Sort of. So I raised the bar: $1,937. Why? It was the number of Facebook fans we had at the time. The messaging could be spun so that it read that all it would take to meet goal was for each fan to donate a dollar.

The energy in the kitchen raised. Jen suggested Tim wear the shirt to work one day for me. But it wasn’t enough. This type of campaign isn’t about me, the individual, it was about something larger. The payoff had to reward the group. And so, we landed on a two-pronged pay-off. If I won, Tim would wear the shirt in public, have his photo taken in it while he stood in front of DC landmarks (which would be posted on Facebook) AND he had to wear it live, in front of our closing night audience for vibrator, while giving the curtain speech. And finally, he had to join Twitter because making him a believer is only one step. Turning him into a user is another. And so it began.

(You can click HERE to see the link to the customized page I made.)

I started small, posting the link on the Woolly Facebook Page and sending it out on Twitter, then sharing and re-tweeting on my personal pages. We got a few gifts the first day, accounting for almost 20% of the goal. Over the next several days gifts slowly rolled in, and the link got re-tweeted and shared on other Facebook pages. After a few days, the $1,937 goal started to seem totally lofty. Enormous. Too ambitious. People started asking me what would happen if I lost. Lost? Well, we had never really discussed that.

Then, something sort of extraordinary happened.

As the deadline date drew closer people outside our network chimed in and began to help out by sharing the link on their own pages and tweeting it out, sharing messages like: “Social media fuels the arts” and “Help us test SM’s fundraising effectiveness and give to a groundbreaking DC theater at the same time!” In the last 24 hours you could sit and watch the donations increase at a seemingly exponential rate. Aaron Heinsman, Director of the Annual Fund, and I started shrieking in the office and texting each other as we saw the numbers grow larger as we sat at home. Then, at 11:58am on October 1st – five hours and two minutes before deadline – we met our goal.

Here are the stats:

• 156 gifts were received for a total of $2,209, making the average gift $14.
• Gifts ranged form $1 to $100. (Note that it was not possible to donate just $1 on the custom website. One person emailed us complaining about this fact and made a $1 on the normal Woolly online donation page. Another gave $1 in cash.)
• Gifts were received from 23 states.
• In the last 24 hours, 74 gifts were received, accounting for 64% of all donors.
• Last-day gifts totaled $1,044, accounting for 47% of the income goal.
• The social media Size of the Gift campaign raised nearly twice as much money as everyone who participated in the regular Size of the Gift campaign combined.

However, in addition to some pretty surprising (and thrilling!) income goals, some interesting stats on the social media front popped up as well:

• Over the course of the campaign we acquired 66 new Facebook fans and 66 new Twitter followers. (Slightly higher than average.)
• After sending it out only over the Woolly Mammoth Twitter Feed, the “It’s Not the Size of the Gift…” link was re-tweeted 135 times, and got 355 click-throughs.
• After posting the “It’s Not the Size of the Gift…” link on the Woolly Facebook Page, it was re-posted on others’ walls 172 times.

For me personally, the impulse of the idea was just fun. I’m obviously a big fan of social media and think it’s being underutilized in the American theatre primarily because so many people and organizations think of Facebook and Twitter as simply marketing and communications tools. They are not.

Now that the campaign is over, I can’t stop thinking about it. Within hours of it ending people started asking “what’s next.” Questions popped up on the #2amt feed that Friday night saying that this campaign was a success but it was jus a bet. What if the stakes were higher?

Quite frankly, I don’t know what is next for me, or for the development department. Maybe it’s a flash mob? Or Tweet Seats that actually work? Maybe Devo will fund an entire campaign for new plays only using Twitter. Maybe I’ll never send out another press release again. I often think that there is only so much planning that can go into this kind of work. “Successful Spontaneous Initiative” might be a bit oxymoronic in this industry.

But sometimes—and oftentimes when it comes to social media—you just have to seize the moment of the idea and just try it out to see what happens. And, as you go, do your best to track it. Do you best to push it into being successful—in whatever shape success means for you. In this case, the campaign was a success. We raised the money. Tim has a Twitter account. He publicly humiliated himself. The Woolly staff got behind an idea and had a ton of fun. We had a champagne toast, all of us, because it took all of us. A cheesy statement, but true: I could not have done this alone. I needed the network. Additionally, it was proved that social media can be a powerful tool that everyone in a company can utilize. And, finally, maybe we proved to you the same? And maybe you will be inspired to try something too?

But, like Zuckerburg says in The Social Network, sometimes one success isn’t good enough. Facebook doesn’t end. Twitter won’t end. These things changed the world, the way we communicate, the way we behave, for better of worse. You have to keep growing, and creating, and trying, and failing. That’s been the mission of Woolly for 31 years. A spontaneous online social media fundraising campaign was just another way to adhere to that mission, and the funds that were raised will support both our artistic and connectivity outreach – like producing the world premiere of House of Gold and funding possible future new media campaigns.

And, so, for our next trick…

Follow us on Twitter at @woollymammothtc. But be warned: the next time, it might not work out so well.

~Alli Houseworth, Communications and New Media Manager

Tim Plant gives a curtain speech in his "I Heart Social Media" T-shirt

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How did you hear about Woolly’s social media fundraising campaign? Leave a comment and let us know. Did you give? If so, tell us what motivated you to do so! We love hearing from our readers.