5 Reasons to Engage an Offline Audience, Online

About a month ago, I began doing some work for the United Way of Metropolitan Nashville (UWMN) in Online Engagement. The last Day of Action for 2010 was quickly approaching and while we worked to engage our online audience throughout the month, we wanted a strategy to engage the event volunteers (offline audience) online. We also wanted to reach beyond our ‘network’ into our volunteers’ networks of friends online.

At last week’s Day of Action | Health: Community Baby Shower, UWMN had almost 150 volunteers from more than 40 companies uniting to make a difference in the lives of 1500 at-risk expectant moms in the Nashville Metro area. Shower-in-a-Bags included over 60,000 items such as diapers, wipes, clothes, blankets and formula.

The Day of Action is always a large volunteer event with a lot of hustle and bustle. We wanted to capture and share the excitement of the day; but more importantly, we wanted our volunteers (our offline audience) to document (i.e. SHARE) their experience with their online networks. Because their online networks likely consist of people just like them, who share the ‘volunteer, advocate, give’ values that UWMN promotes. These are people that UWMN may not yet be connected to but are ideal candidates for our message. And thus, our volunteers become influencers – or as we like to call them, advocates.

Without further adieux, here are 5 reasons to engage your offline brand, online:

1. 57% increase in Daily Users who have engaged with your Facebook Page, viewed your Facebook Page, or consumed content generated by your Facebook Page (Unique Users)
2. 67% increase in Daily New Likes of your Facebook Page (Total Count)
3. 76% increase in Daily Page Views from users logged into Facebook (Total Count)
4. 67% increase in Daily Page Views from users logged into Facebook (Unique Users)
5. 78% increase in Daily Impressions of stream stories generated by your Facebook Page (Total Count)

BUT WAIT! What did we do to generate those impressive increases on Facebook? We invited our volunteers to document their experience with the UW Flip Cam. We loaned them a flip cam, they recorded a short video of what was going on, and then we helped them load the video on to their personal Facebook pages to share with their networks. We also made sure they tagged United Way of Metropolitan Nashville in their post.

Unfortunately, Facebook didn’t want to cooperate and several of the videos, while they were tagged, didn’t appear on the UWMN Facebook page. Sometimes technology gets in the way of a great idea. But as you can tell from the measurements, this campaign was still extremely successful. So much so that the UW Flip Cam will be a standard opportunity at all future Days of Action.

How will you engage YOUR offline audience, online?