Competition is a powerful motivator and the Jewish Community Heroes campaign is a great example of how to harness people’s competitive instincts to achieve multiple benefits. I learned about the campaign when I recently received an email encouraging me to vote for noted holocaust survivor and author Gerda Weissmann Klein to be recognized as a Jewish Hero. She is a very worthy hero in my mind, so I happily clicked the link and voted for her. After voting, I was given an opportunity to get updates on the voting and FIND OUT WHO WINS! by just providing my email address and zip code. When I did, I was invited to Spread The Word by emailing friends. Brilliant, think about how this seemingly simple website is able to achieve so many desirable goals including:

• providing recognition for many worthy individuals – not just the winner, but everyone who is nominated.
• engaging constituents in the process of nomination, voting and campaigning.
• dramatically expanding website visitors and collecting lots of email addresses using viral and social networking techniques that require very little effort (or really commitment) from participants.

Although creating a sophisticated campaign like this may be beyond your non-profit’s current capacity, there are still some great lessons about using friendly competition (a common option in team-raising and sponsored event tools) and about using non-fundraising engagement tools (e.g. petitions and surveys) to build email lists that can be cultivated into active supporters.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 1st, 2009 at 1:20 pm and is filed under donor email addresses, fundraising basics, social networking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.