American Cancer Society More Birthdays – Non Profit Social Media Marketing Example #2

I’m on to my second post in my social media nonprofit series and I decided to check out the American Cancer Society (ACS).  As a side note, I will soon venture outside of the cancer world in this series but I couldn’t resist this one.

I saw the ACS “More Birthdays” television spot awhile back and I thought they did a great job.  Maybe it’s because I’m a cancer survivor and I agree that another birthday is a big celebration, but I wanted to check out what else they were doing around this campaign.

I started at Morebirthdays.com.  

The site was easy to navigate and gave me some great options for engaging.  The first thing I did was declare ACS the official sponsor of my birthday.  As an incentive to get people signed up, they are offering the 50,000th person some free birthday gear.  There are some cute items with the campaign theme including a water bottle, t-shirt, hats, etc.  Would be even cuter if it was a package to plan a birthday party—party favors, plates, etc.  At this point, they have around 5,000 more to go so they are getting closer.   Once I signed up, it gave me an option to share with my friends via email.  I wish I could have just tweeted it or added it to my Facebook status so I didn’t have to provide email addresses for my friends.

 

Facebook

The next place I went was to declare ACS my official birthday cause on Facebook.  That gave me the opportunity to wish my friends with upcoming birthdays a happy birthday or even make a donation in honor of their birthday.  When you click on the donate button, it takes you to a secure 3rd party site—very cool feature.  
It also installed a widget on my Facebook page.  When I go to the widget, I can see who has birthdays are coming up, send them a message or make a donation in honor of their birthday.  My friends can install the widget and the application by clicking on my widget on my page.   

 

Birthday Page

Another cool feature was the opportunity to create a birthday page and ask people to donate in honor of your birthday.  At last check, 732 people had created pages—seems pretty significant.  I took a look at one to see how I could share these with my friends.  It does give me the capability to email it but again, I would love to be able to post it to my Facebook status or even tweet it to my followers.

 

Birthday Blog

The site also had a feed from their blog. They’ve been very consistent with posting blogs—I love the birthday freebies post that shows places to get free stuff on your birthday and as a parent, birthdays on a budget was also very interesting.  In general the posts have some nice variety and provide some pretty useful content.  And they even give their readers the opportunity to post their own story by logging into wordpress—a very nice touch.

 

Twitter

Next stop was Twitter.  I had to search it out because I couldn’t easily find a way to connect with Twitter from the blog or the Morebirthdays.com site.  Sure enough the tweets are all focused on birthdays—some link to the birthday blog, others link to other sites with articles or lists of birthdays.  I clicked around and found some interesting stories and articles and decided to follow them.


 

Final Thoughts

ACS has done a really good job making a connection for me.  In general they’ve got lots of great concepts here tied together in a nice cohesive campaign.  They’ve got some easy to use tools to help me stay connected.  I love the idea of donating to ACS in honor of someone’s birthday and they make it so simple for me through the Facebook application.  I’m excited to see how they continue to build on their efforts.  What do you think about the campaign?  Do you see anything else they could add? Post a comment and let me know your thoughts.



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