The limited media market in Orange County is no surprise to any nonprofit looking to build its power – this includes building power through social media in Orange County. It’s one reason that we loved the social media challenge presented to us by our client Habitat for Humanity of Orange County.

The Habitat OC team added a social media element to its Leaders Build Challenge, a unique fundraising and team-building event pitting corporations against one another while they build affordable homes in Fullerton, CA. “How do we ensure the teams participate in the social media challenge so that they have more fun and we boost our brand recognition?” the team asked.

“Easy,” we said. We need a creative social media theme, a social media promotional kit with branded visuals, and a whole lot of reminders.

Here’s a little case study on social media in Orange County showing how we got participants to use our social media toolkit in 26 postings, for a total of 119 posts to personal and professional social media pages.

We Needed To Understand How Social Media Could Build Momentum for This Fundraiser

Because social media had not been part of Habitat OC’s event strategy for the Leaders Build Challenge in the past, we knew we would need to create internal systems to manage the workflow, and also external systems to ensure the participants interacted with the assets we created.

Our social media analysis of Habitat OC’s current posts and followers, the type of followers it was courting and the accounts of Leaders Build Challenge participants revealed that we needed strategies that would appeal to both the participants’ personal social media accounts and their company’s accounts – each with their own targeted posts and calls to action.

We Needed A Fun Campaign That Resonated With Our Target Audience: Professionals in Orange County

For the affordable housing fundraiser for Habitat OC, we know it couldn’t be about affordable homes, or stats on where the money goes, or event about participating in the Leaders Build Challenge specifically. We needed something bigger. Something much more fun to say.

We had to tap into what most professionals know best: ties and suits.

That’s what powered our Real Leaders Wear Hard Hats social media campaign utilizing the event hashtag #leadersbuild2019.

One Part Capacity Building Magic and One Part Having Fun with Social Media in Orange County

We worked with the Habitat OC team to create a plan for social media, and we developed tools and systems to make it easier for Challenge participants to post to their personal and company social media accounts. However small these may feel, they aided efficient and organized communications and tracking between so many players: internal team, consultants and participants.

• Create a content calendar to plan and track all social media posts
• Create sample posts and branded graphics for social media
• Develop a how-to document and system for capturing photos and videos and sharing them with Mixte
• Establish a system for tracking Leaders Build Challenge team’s social media posts

One simple thing we love to do with all of our clients is teach teammates how capture basic quality videos. Videos are essential for social media engagement, but it can be a challenge for organizations to collect quality video from their teams out in the field.

Bonus: these videos can be turned into fun gifs for our clients too:

We Set Goals to Help Us Measure the Success of Our Organic Social Media Content

We learned a ton in our first year of the Real Leaders Wear Hard Hat social media campaign that will inform how we approach this effort in 2020. Having these measurable goals allows us to assess which elements worked and how well. In our first year, we wanted four leaders to post video, eight participants to use our hashtag on personal accounts, and two companies to use the hashtag on company pages.

One-quarter of the posts incorporated our social media assets, telling us that they were vital components to the success of the program, but only one company posted the video before the challenge. Our takeaway from that data point is that we cut our timeline too short in 2019, and we need to allow more time for the video to be filmed, edited and posted in time to promote the Leaders Build Challenge prior to the event.

Our Creative Ideas Were So Well Received They Might Make Tees

While it certainly wasn’t the goal of our social media campaign for this nonprofit, it is one mark of how well our creativity tied together the event’s goals and the interests of the event’s target audience. We can’t wait to show you how we grow this effort for #LeadersBuild2020