A Case Study For Non-profits On How To Activate The Crowd

A Case Study For Non-profits On How To Activate The Crowd

Mon 21 May 2012

Story by Madlen Nicolaus
 

Food Revolution Day



Since 2010, the Jamie Oliver Food Foundation (US) has been promoting better food education, and inspiring people in America and around the world to stand up for real food. This year, Jamie’s foundation projects in the US, UK and Australia joined forces and declared May 19 to be Global Food Revolution Day, encouraging people to get involved wherever they were, to host their own dinner parties, and local food events, including community picnics and cooking events. This resulted in an impressive 1000 food events and dinner parties, hosted in 664 cities across 62 countries and raised over $20,000 so far, enough for over 800 food education classes impacting 20,000 children!

This is a great example for other non-profit organizations around the world on how they can build an engagement mechanism that can make change happen.

So let’s take a look at their strategy and approach around Food Revolution Day, to see how the Jamie Oliver Food Foundation put this together:

• Jamie Oliver, as one of the World’s most famous Chefs, heads the campaign against the use of processed foods, utilizing all his online channels and his celebrity to get people involved.
• He initially built awareness for the Food Revolution name through a popular Television show.
• Following this the Food Revolution Website goes live, showcasing toolkits for starting your own Food Revolution, top user stories, a map of community groups across America, featured blogs of the month and more.
• The team built a Facebook Community for Food Revolution supporters across the world.
• They also created a Pinterest page where they shared the Food Revolution photos, videos and recipes, and listed the Food Revolution Day Blogs around the world.
• They set up a Google+ page for the community of "Food Revolutionaries".
• They created a dedicated Twitter account @Foodrev where the Food Revolution team shared news, information, and engaged with the participants of this global food festival, Food Revolution Day.
• 6 weeks before the first global day of action the team launched a separate website for Food Revolution Day, where people could find out everything about May 19th and how to get involved.
• Jamie created numerous YouTube videos explaining the background of the Food Revolution Day campaign.
• The Food Revolution Day website offers free Food Revolution eBooks, web banners, logos, promotional material, and dinner party starter kits for download and sharing.
• Through the website supporters can upload their recipes and inspirational videos. They also ran a MOFILM Video Campaign in order to inspire filmmakers to create videos for Food Revolution Day. Some even wrote songs about it.
• Jamie created a Spotify playlist that people could play at their Food Revolution Day Event.
• On Food Revolution Day itself Jamie hosted his first ever, live Google+ Hangout On Air, where he connected with four Food Revolutionaries across the world for an interactive dinner and conversation based around the Food Revolution. Here is the video.

The Food Revolution Command Center

With almost 1,000 events hosted by supporters around the world you can imagine that there was a large amount of online conversation going on in the last months, finally peaking over the “Food Revolution Day” weekend.

This is where Salesforce Radian6 comes in. To help the Food Revolution Team stay on top of the online chatter around #FoodRevolution and #RealFood, we provided licenses for the Radian6 Engagement Console and Insights Dashboard. That way the Food Revolution Team could establish their own Command Center in Nile Street in London as well as in San Francisco.

In the 30 days leading up to May 19th, six of their team members monitored over 51,000 conversations in total. On Food Revolution Day itself, the conversation peaked with over 15,000 posts, more than 625 posts per hour.

The vast majority of conversations – 95.4 percent – were found on Twitter. Removing the Micromedia trendline allows us to better see the other platforms people used to talk about Food Revolution Day and #realfood. There were 742 posts on Facebook and almost 700 blogs shared about Food Revolution Day so far.

Many celebrities and online influencers helped spread the word around the event, these included: @CodySimpson, @RichardBranson, @EddieIzzard, @Stephenfry, @GwynethPaltrow and @TylerFlorence.

Lessons to be learned for social organizations and nonprofits



The Food Revolution Day and Jamie Oliver Food Foundation are a great case study on how non-profit and charity organizations can build momentum for their message in the social space:

1. Have a simple message that people grasp. E.g. “Lets all get together on Food Revolution Day and stand up for real food”
2. Have a vivid call to action that is linked to your message – Host an event, share your knowledge, inspire better food education.
3. Allow everyone to get involved. Use all networks at your disposal to establish a community around your cause.
4. Focus on under 25s – get their attention, their networks are often the most active and connected.
5. Secure the commitment of like-minded companies, organizations and individuals to unify expertise and support the message.
6. Get celebrities and influencers to spread the word to increase the reach of your message.
7. Monitor the conversation, engage with the community and measure your results. This will help you to learn where your campaign is working well, and how it can be developed further.

Besides studying the campaign strategy and analyzing the data, we also had the chance to experience a little bit of this special food celebration day. We were invited to the Indian Street Food Supper Club event in London, hosted above Jamie’s restaurant Fifteen in London, by the amazing Maunika Gowardhan, a private chef and freelance food writer based in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. Just have a look at this flickr set and you will understand why #realfood is the best.

We at SalesForce Radian6 stand up for real food!

About the author: Madlen Nicolaus is Senior Marketing and Community Manager at Salesforce Radian6 in the UK. Outside of work, she loves to travel and takes photos of absolutely everything... If there’s no photo, it didn’t happen! Find out more www.madlennicolaus.com