This year I launched the fundraising site www.dareboy.co.uk and the analytics show that social media outperformed the local press in driving visitor numbers.
The site has been a big success and has helped me raise £3,783.46 so far.
The graphic below shows a comparison between the day my social media marketing campaign kicked off, versus the day when the Gloucestershire Echo (circulation 18,000) ran a story about my fundraising efforts.
A bit of background on DareBoy
The DareBoy website is based on the simple idea of ‘dares for donations’. For every £100 accumulated in the donation pot, I do the most popular dare as voted for by my readers. I video every dare and put them on-line that day.
Video has played an important part in dareboy’s success and my most popular video (shown below) has been viewed over 2000 times. At the end of each video I put a link back to the dareboy website and the reason I am raising money.
Dare #7 Shave my head
How I got 360 visitors on day 1
These are the social media tools that I used to drive traffic to DareBoy.
- WordPress: I built the site using WordPress (self hosted), with a twitter plugin so my blog posts get tweeted automatically.
- I used Feedburner so visitors could sign up to receive an email every time I do a new dare.
- I used PollDaddy to add an interactive element to dareboy, so readers could vote of which dare they wanted me to do next.
- Facebook: I started posting about what DareBoy was trying to do and asking for suggestions for dares through my friends network on Facebook.
- Twitter: I started tweeting about DareBoy.
- Email: I emailed my friends to let them know what DareBoy was up to. I asked all my friends for help and to send the www.dareboy.co.uk link to their friends.
- Justgiving.com: This is the website I used so my readers could donate online.
Local press coverage had little effect on visitor numbers to www.dareboy.co.uk
The Gloucestershire Echo has a circulation of 18,000 but seems to have had little impact on the traffic sent to DareBoy even though I got a full-page covering the story and they put the url of DareBoy in the article.
I’m always surprised that the PR community is still so reliant on using traditional media to try and reach online users. The traffic statistics on DareBoy show that social media is much more effective than print for increasing visitor numbers to websites.
DareBoy coverage in the Gloucestershire Echo
