This fall, with the Senate version of a climate bill coming into the foreground, we engaged the community in creating a message that could define a call to action for the climate movement. Twitter seemed like the best fit as a social media tool for this project: something simple to create, share, and distribute with a broad reach, without a lot of assets to manage, and try to create a fun, new dialog about the climate bill.
So, we created and launched the "1Climate, 1Tweet" contest, a Twitter campaign designed to meet very general goals of community involvement in campaign messaging and increased messaging in the “Twittersphere” around the climate movement and the Senate climate bill.
We came up with very specific campaign goals:
The results? We received more than 50 entries and dozens of rewteeted messages using the “#1climate” hash tag during the contest. Planet Green, Current Green, and Grist were among the top bloggers who covered the contest. We also built a great Twitter application for our website, thanks to Community IT Innovators (CITIDC). The widget was used as a way to show recently tweeted #1climate entries and provide a count for unique re-tweets. The widget also removed any tweets that used profanity or used terms or phrases that we thought would be negative for the campaign. The portable widget is no longer available, but you can view it on our site here.
Furthermore, we got to speak about it with other organizations and groups at TWTRCON, a twitter convention in Washington, DC.
So, what was the ROI? Well, lower than we thought. We had hoped for more entries, more re-tweets, and more interaction with our contestants. We messaged them directly several times to promote their messages to be eligible for prizes and messaging finals. We also missed an opportunity to gather a new batch of Twitter names from a social media list build prior to the campaign, giving us a low number of entries and word of mouth. Following the contest, the team broke down the results with a post-mortem on Google Docs:
What worked:
What to do in the future for similar campaigns:
Going forward, we’re able to see how we can gather our followers and use our various lists to build a campaign and simplify our messages with our followers. There are thousands of climate legislation conversations happening right now, and we want to be a part of every one of them. Social media will help us get there with a bit of tweaking…and tweeting.
Oh, and a nice word from our contest winner:
1Sky supporter Elle Cayabyab Gitlin of Washington, DC composed the winning #1Climate tweet: "Climate change won't wait for legislation that's late: #1climate"
Gitlin said of her tweet, “Taking care of the world we live in is the responsible thing to do. That’s why I want Congress to pass comprehensive legislation that not only creates jobs in the clean energy sector, but also uses American creativity to come up with solutions that will save billions of dollars in energy costs. We need decisive action now to protect not just our environment, but our economy, our health, our jobs, and our nation’s security.”
*Luis Hestres, Kimberly Fountain, and Alex Bea are members of the 1Sky team.
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