Thank You for #hungertohope!

Photo Courtesy of World Food Programme

Yesterday, the Mightycause team raised awareness and money for Yum! Brands World Hunger Relief project to benefit the World Food Programme. In all, 143 people contributed $4,815 to the effort.

We had a significantly higher goal for the effort, BUT we think the campaign was successful from an advocacy and awareness standpoint.

Georgetown University’s Center for Social Impact Communication released a significant study earlier this year that demonstrates social sharing does impact charitable actions and giving. According to the study, people who frequently engaged in promotional social activity are:

  • — Twice as likely to volunteer their time.
  • — Twice as likely to take part in events like charity walk.
  • — Three times as likely to solicit donations on behalf of their cause.

With this in mind, we think we made some serious progress in encouraging people to take further action in the future.

Twitter served as the social PR hub, while an ad campaign and social application drove in significant traffic from Facebook. More than 500 tweets were generated for a tweet bomb we orchestrated at 8:30 a.m. EST yesterday. In addition, another 1,100 tweets were generated over the remaining 30 hours during and preceding World Food Day.

Blog Action

Many bloggers stood up and provided posts and insights into why they felt donating to the Hunger to Hope Project matters.

Ann Marie van den Hurk committed a post on the Mind the Gap blog to the effort, sharing from a mother’s perspective. “I currently live in a poor rural county where children face many challenges. Hunger is one of them. And it pains me to see this,” she said.

Danny Brown lent his blog to the effort on his birthday. “We need to take a step back and really look at the things that matter. Like world hunger,” he says. He gets extra points for unselfishness on a day when he had every right to be the opposite.

Jason Falls and the Social Media Explorer team weighed in as fans of Louisville’s own Yum! Brands. “This isn’t just a noble cause. It’s a no-brainer,” they say. “So we thought our readers ought to know about it and help us help hungry children around the world.”

Jayme Soulati dropped a surprise post for us, and broke down our tweet bomb yesterday morning. “Those who manage causes cannot ignore bloggers’ influence or social media networking. A tweet bomb is a perfectly easy way to showcase an issue and even create a trending topic.”

Mila Araujo also contributed to the effort, sharing a quiz for those interested in helping out: “What is really interesting is that when you take their quiz, this action supports the cause! What a great idea!”

Shonali Burke added her thoughts based on the campaign and attending a Christina Aguilera event with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. “It was a terrific event,” she says. “It was the first time I’d been to the State Department, or seen H.C. in person, or, for that matter, Xtina, so there was that cool factor.”

Rich Becker weighed in as someone who has also served as an activist to end hunger. “But really, this campaign will benefit the program even more than that because Yum! brands will match $10,000” he says.

Cathy Larkin of Huggable People interviewed me as the campaign manager on why he cared about the effort. I answered, “Anytime I get a chance to engage in a little social good for work, I’m thrilled, and as a Dad even more so when it helps children.”

Our own Margie Clayman got busy early with a post to her personal following asking them to participate in the day’s activities. “When you consider that many people giving just $10 could get us there in no time” she says. “It also seems entirely, 100% doable.” She also gave the Inspiring Generosity community 10 tips on how to do simple, good deeds that go a long way.

Also on the Inspiring Generosity blog was Sohini Baliga’s powerful piece on how hunger isn’t an insurmountable problem. She says we “are now empowered to fund the alleviation of one of the oldest, most longstanding social inequalities in human history through the daily course of your day. And with very little effort.”

Another Inspiring Generosity regular Ken Mueller weighed in, too. “If you’re anything like me, you might open up a full fridge or a full kitchen cupboard, and walk away saying, ‘There’s nothing to eat!’ … just because nothing seemed like the right thing to eat at the moment,” he says. “#FirstWorldProblems. But 1 of every 7 people in the world goes to bed hungry.”

Joe Waters reminded us of the importance of telling the compelling stories of one to get people to act, and John Haydon interviewed Bettina Luescher of the World Food Programme on video about hope versus pity. Here’s a blog post about it!

Several bloggers allowed us to guest blog, too:

Beth Kanter‘s blog featured a post on how we would measure the Hunger to Hope campaign.

Gini Dietrich featured a Tuesday afternoon spot on the actual campaign, and how we worked around not being able to use stories in our efforts.

And the Frogloop blog featured a piece on how small acts really do make a big difference in peoples’ lives.

All of these posts were in addition to the work published here and my personal Posterous blog.

Thank you to everyone who participated in the effort. We really appreciate your time, donations and sharing on your social networks. The campaign continues through January 3, 2013 so please continue to spread the word and help fund this important project by visiting the campaign page.