Many thanks to Duncan Kinney for the excellent ThirdTuesday recap!
Oprah, Ashton Kutcher and CNN have nothing to do with this post.
Third Tuesday Calgary was home to two charities who explained how they use Twitter and other social media platforms to promote their causes.
Calgary Reads is an early literacy initiative that targets grade two readers and their families in the Calgary area. Brown Bagging for Calgary’s Kids provides nutritious lunches to 1300 plus kids in Calgary schools and programs every day.
Doug Lacombe and Andrew McIntyre volunteered to run the social media campaign for Calgary Reads. Their biggest objective was to push people to their annual book sale. The sale is how Calgary Reads raises most of its money.
The book sale runs May 1-3 and they started their campaign in mid-March. They sat down beforehand and created objectives:
- Push people to the book sale
- Leave Calgary Reads with a social media publishing platform.
They’re using Flickr, Youtube, Twitter, Facebook, a WordPress blog and Pitchengine. From their own estimate it took them 2-3 hours to set up each platform.
Then they established success metrics like;
- Number of Facebook fans
- Unique visitors to blog
- Media mentions
- Book sale revenue
- Retweets
- Adoption of social media by Calgary Reads staff