Motivating people to donate was key to influencer campaign

Habitat for Humanity is well-known. The global nonprofit that builds homes for low-income families has little difficulty turning out armies of volunteers to construct the single-family residences for which they are (understandably) famous. Much less well-known is the need for funds to support these efforts. For its success in this area, Habitat for Humanity has won first place in the “Influencer and Donor Relations” category of PR Daily’s 2018 Nonprofit PR Awards.

With a goal of raising awareness of the opportunity to donate, Habitat undertook a comprehensive campaign that began with research to determine what drives its target audience to donate, resulting in three donor profiles and the identification of three target audiences for its messages.

Partnerships included 25 influencers to drive one of the key programs, two top-tier influencers for another program and corporate partnerships to encourage campaign participation through donations (Nissan contributed $1 for every use of the campaign hashtag, for example).

Two programs were executed under the campaign slogan, “Home is the Key.” They were executed during April, when two next-door homes were built for two single mothers; cable stars The Property Brothers built the homes along with a variety of corporate partners (e.g., Schneider Electric, HGTV and Nissan). One program involving multiple influencers was titled “Swag and Tag,” an online campaign; the other—“On-the-Ground Reporters”—involved live reporters/influencers sharing content from the Tennessee site where the two homes were being built.

The campaign achieved exceptional results, including 87 social posts from influencers who agreed to serve as brand ambassadors (a 770 percent increase from 2017), hundreds of thousands of campaign impressions from the three reporters participating in the “On-the-Ground” program (an increase from the two reporters in the original plan) and 429.3 million organic impressions, most coming from the social media space.

Congratulations to Habitat’s Rowena Sara and Allison Green.