I am quite surprised at myself for taking so long to write about this subject, as I have been grappling with it since Kids Are Heroes was conceived. Publicity is a good thing, right? That’s what I keep telling myself. Boy if we could just get on Oprah or Ellen or whatever show then so many more people would know about us and we would be able to affect so many more lives. We would get so many more donations we wouldn’t need to ask for money any more. As I hear myself talk I still believe that to some extent. To be honest I get flustered with the whole process. In the beginning we had two PR people work with us. One had us “very close” to being on the Today show and the other told me that our message wasn’t clear enough. Needless to say the Today show didn’t work out and although other people have told me that our message is clear, that statement has stuck with me and I do believe that at least now it is crystal clear.
Don’t get me wrong, if you look at our press box you will see we have indeed seen a lot of chatter about us in the past 3 years, and we are very grateful for it. What has eluded us for the most part is national and even regional attention.
Recently I was contacted by a producer at ABC. She found us via Google (Yay Google!) and wanted 10-12 year-olds who give back for a town-hall type TV show hosted by Diane Sawyer. The show was to honor Nelson Mandela. She wanted kids who were making a difference on a global scale. Finally we had something that matched us perfectly. We have been turned down for grants because we don’t focus exclusively on our local community. The catch was these kids had to be close to New York City. I offered to pay our way to NYC as I felt MaryMargaret would have been a great candidate. (For those of you who are unaware, MaryMargaret is the founder of Kids Are Heroes.) I sent them other great kids too, some older than 12. The odd thing was that this producer came back to me saying they only wanted the older kids and were not interested in MaryMargaret. I have to admit I was disappointed but happy at least to be offering that opportunity to the older kids. I heard a few weeks later that the producer had told them the higher-ups had changed their minds again and wanted 10-12 year-olds, yet she never came back to me. One thing I’ve learned is that if you are in the publicity game, you must have a thick skin. What it boils down to for those who can give it to you, is nothing more than ratings and money. They look at what we are offering as a commodity, not something that can potentially change the world. The quicker we can come to terms with that, the better off we will be.
And then there is the voting phenomenon. After MaryMargaret won the Discovery Girls Role Model contest (thanks to many of you) I swore I’d never go through that again. It was humiliating to ask for votes and now there are so many contests out there that it is becoming more obnoxious than anything else. So what did I do? I entered her in the Energizer Bunny Hall of Fame contest. Now in my own defense, as I understood it they would pick the top 100, (which did include MaryMargaret) then they would choose the top 10. The winner would be selected from the top 10 via a voting process. However, those in the top 10 would win $1000 for their favorite charity. So on merit alone, MaryMargaret could win the donation which we sorely need. Now comes the rub: The Bunny decided that they would open up the voting so that the “fan favorite” could be one of the top 10 and the other nine would be selected by their committee. So I got sucked in again asking for votes. Thanks to you (again) MaryMargaret did well with well over 250 votes, but sadly it wasn’t enough. I even stopped asking for votes when it became clear that some of these others had many more Facebook fans than we did. So we move on. And who knows, we will know on April 4th if she was chosen to be in the top ten.
And let’s not forget our “Celebrity Roundup” session we completed a few months ago. We sent personal letters to no less than 153 people I deemed as celebrities that I respected and could have given us a big boost if they promoted us. We only received a handful back that could not be found at that address so I know I hit my mark in most circumstances. A few people were very polite, (i.e. the assistants of Carlos Santana, Bill Clinton, Bill Cosby, etc.) and turned us down in a personal and respectful way. For the most part, however, we received no response at all. I am not necessarily blaming them, I guess it was more of a learning process for us to see if that would be an effective tool. Apparently it wasn’t.
Sometimes I say to myself that I should just keep our nose to the grindstone and do what we do every day — promote what these kids are doing via social media and let the publicity come naturally. This is honestly what I would prefer to do but sometimes admittedly I get sidetracked. Do you remember the old cartoons of a dog who tiptoes as he sniffs a cloud of smoke, his nose fluttering, and follows it to a ham or a turkey? That’s sort of what happens to me when the “smell” of publicity gets near me. I cannot control myself.
So why am I hounding publicity? Do I want to be famous? Do I want MaryMargaret to be famous? I will state undeniably and unequivocally: No and NO! As a matter of fact the second to last thing I want is for me to be famous and the absolute last thing I want is for MaryMargaret to be famous. Although I have no interest in her, Fame can be a very seductive lady, yet she is also extremely destructive. She can chew you up and spit you out, tied in a knot just like a cherry stem. I value my privacy and the thought of not being able to be left alone while in public absolutely turns my stomach. So Fame is not my thing. What we look for on an every day basis is elevated awareness for Kids Are Heroes. That is why we work so hard in social media. We just want other people to know about what these kids are doing. We want to share the incredible feelings we have when we listen to them and witness when they get together. We want to share with others the wondrous results that we get when these kids get involved in giving back. It plainly and simply enriches their lives and turns them into leaders. That is what we’re all about.
Some of you may have seen the tweet recently about our new Kids Are Heroes theme song. This was written and produced by one of our talented ambassadors, Chip Richter. One of the reasons he created it is because we have a local production company that is trying to develop a documentary series about us. As a matter of fact, the pitch reel should be ready any day now. The idea is that the producers will go to Halogen TV, Nickelodeon and others to see if they are interested in a series that highlights our children. I do hope it works as I can guarantee one thing it will deliver: inspiration. Stay tuned for developments on this.
So in the end have I sworn off those voting contests? In my mind I loathe them, but I never say never.
MaryMargaret, the founder of Kids Are Heroes, has an opportunity to win a $10,000 scholarship and a $5000 donation to Kids Are Heroes! And YOU can help make that happen.
The Energizer Bunny is hosting a Hall of Fame contest for people of all ages who are involved in their communities. Most of the online voting systems require voting once a day, maybe for as long as a month. This one is SUPER easy. We need just ONE Facebook ‘Like’ to get her in the top ten!
Here are the 2 easy steps:
1) Go to MaryMargaret’s Energizer Bunny Hall of Fame Contest Page. (Must be a Facebook member and logged in. If for some reason the link doesn’t take you there, see below for Troubleshooting.)
2) Click the “Like” button underneath her name.
For more information about the contest, click here. Even if she just makes the top ten, KAH will still get a $1000 donation. But let’s think “positive energy” and take her all the way!!
If you are wondering why she deserves this award, here are the cliff notes:
In March of 2008, she founded Kids Are Heroes by asking her daddy to build her a website. Since then, she has worked countless hours not only promoting the organization, but carrying out her own projects at the same time.
On her 9th birthday she gave up her birthday gifts for the Defenders of Wildlife.
The following year she hosted a lemonade stand which netted $600. With that money she bought 80 Webkinz and delivered them in person to a local youth cancer camp.
She instigated a cell phone drive at her school which brought in 150 used cell phones so troops around the world could speak to their loved ones via the prepaid phone cards that the phones were traded in for.
For 10th birthday party instead of gifts she had a sleeopover party where all of her friends brought pajamas, slippers and bathrobes to donate to the local homeless shelter.
In 2009-2010 MaryMargaret spent more than a year fundraising for her most ambitious project. In 2010, she delivered 250 pre-loaded MP3 players to two area youth hospitals as part of her Music for Life initiative.
In the summer of 2010 she won the Nestlé Drumstick Hero Award given for her philanthropic achievements, which consisted of games, T-shirts and hats, and enough ice cream cones for 50 kids. Instead of throwing a party for her friends, she did it for the Community Action Agency in her neighborhood which serves local needy children.
MaryMargaret’s current project is called “Black to Blue” where she and two friends are raising money to help clean up the animals affected by the gulf oil spill.
For more details, read the press release about her being chosen as a role model by the Discovery Girls magazine.
Troubleshooting: From the Bunny himself: “It seems as if those who cannot view the tab have the “secure browsing” feature enabled on their Facebook account. If you choose to change this, you can do so by going to Account > Account Settings > Account Security and unchecking the box next to Secure Browsing (https). In the meantime, we are working with Facebook to make sure everyone can view the tabs, regardless of whether or not that feature is selected.” We’ve experience that some people are still having trouble, i.e. getting a “stack overflow” problem, but with repeated attempts they were finally able to get through to vote.
Out of the gate we have had quite a bit of success with our twothree four donor walls: the Foundation Wall, the Corporate Wall, the Blogger Wall and the Tweetup Wall. People donate a relatively small amount of money to buy a “brick” on the wall and get a link back to their website and a picture. People seem to really like them and they are certainly a fun way to interact with us. When we invite our 31K+ Twitter followers to the walls I trust you can see how great the exposure is for any company or individual appearing on them. There’s just one problem. I know that if you are raising money you have to ask for it. That has been my downfall since our inception. I hate asking for money and I’m not good at it. I feel like Colin Firth in the King’s Speech as he addresses a crowd. (Well maybe not that bad but you get the idea.) The truth of the matter is I want to get the word out but I don’t want to spam anyone. So there’s a fine line as to how many times per day or week that I can send it out and still feel comfortable.
So I’ve come up with the idea of the “Wall Referral Program”. Here’s how it works. Tweet one of the walls and mention @KidsAreHeroes in the tweet. If someone purchases one of the top level squares on the wall you tweeted within 15 minutes of your tweet, regardless of how they found out about us, you will be entitled to a free square on the same wall. For the Foundation Wall, anyone who refers someone who ends up purchasing a $25 square will get a free $5 square. On the Corporate Wall, anyone who refers a company who buys a $100 square will get a free $25 square. For the Blogger Wall, refer a $50 square and get a $10 square for yourself. I will award up to 5 people for each purchase, but all will have to have tweeted within 15 minutes prior to the purchase, and mention @KidsAreHeroes in the tweet so I know they did it.
So it’s as simple as that. I will of course still tweet out the walls, especially when a new face or company appears on it. But I am hoping I can motivate others to promote it as well. I’m also open to any other ideas you might have. That’s what the comments are for. Thanks so much for your support.
A few weeks ago I learned about JustCoz.org, which allows people to sign up and permit non-profits to tweet once a day through their Twitter stream. I was a bit reluctant at first to sign up because I saw it as something that can easily be misused and our reputation is so important to us, that I didn’t want people to get the wrong impression. (How it works is explained here.) After using it I quickly realized how much it can help us, so have been asking (admittedly sometimes too much) for people to join our “Twitter Team.” In approximately three weeks we have just over 200 people signed up to this service. (To see what we’re talking about, visit http://justcoz.org/KidsAreHeroes).
So far it has been going quite well. A few people didn’t fully realize what they had signed up for and couldn’t understand how I could be tweeting through their stream. Again, to make sure this is a pleasant experience for everyone, I quickly told them how they could opt out of it (which I will repeat a bit later in this post.) When you work so hard in social media as I do, it becomes almost intoxicating to have such instant gratification when you can tweet through so many people’s stream simultaneously. There was one comment about someone being annoyed because the same tweet was coming out of a someone’s Twitter stream once a day. Although the complaints were extremely few and far between, their point was taken. If 20 people join then imagine how much more of an impact 40 would make. Once you hit 200 supporters then 400 looks amazing. For us this is the perfect application because getting the word out to as many people as possible is paramount to us. We are reaching thousands in our Twitter stream, but ultimately we plan on reaching millions as we truly believe what we are doing can have a worldwide impact. So of course the tweet I am going to send is to ask more people to join our JustCoz campaign.
However, the point about the same tweet going by is a valid one. My initial plan was to get as many supporters lined up before we start marketing our huge event in May (blog post to come on that one). But this is social media, and our mission is to support our kids, so I have decided to change the tweets up a bit to support our heroes and other related things. The timing of the first one was perfect, for several reasons. If you know us well enough, you know that for a year and a half we have been trying to help Austin get his wish. It just so happens that the Extreme Home Makeover people are looking for a family in his area right now. So here is the tweet that went out this morning:
“Please help 11 y/o @CalistaCares fulfill her brother Austin’s Wish. http://bit.ly/245A7p #DT @KidsAreHeroes” (For the record, the #DT @KidsAreHeroes” is appended to every tweet I send out of JustCoz. I have no control over that.)
Even though I tweeted it out on a Sunday, it got quite a bit of notice. I would like to iterate what John of @mcleansports wrote in the Comments section:
“I will foward this story to a few people i know here in NY and see if we can get the ball rolling for him. Also, Will send to News stations as well. I am sure someone will see it and touch them enough to keep things going and word of mouth is the best way to get his story out. With this i am sure that word will get to them and this Dream will happen. If it is fixing current house or Building a new One. Together we will make this happen. I will start with Three Talk shows and see if One of these will be moved enough to start the process. God bless you Austin and Don’t Worry Dude this will happen for you.”
So of course this made me feel good — a lot better than getting a few more supporters. Since the EMHO campaign goes on through the end of March I plan on doing it again, maybe on a Thursday or Friday morning where Twitter traffic is pretty heavy.
But this taught me that I should mix it up a bit so as to respect all the people who have given us the privilege of using their Twitter stream once a day. So if you sign up, this is what I promise:
What I Will Tweet
I will tweet posts like the one I wrote for Austin. I will also send links to our heroes’ profiles on our site and/or blog posts where I interview or feature them. I still will occasionally ask for more JustCoz supporters. I will also sometimes point the links to our donor walls, as this serves two purposes. 1) It rewards and encourages the supporters who have already purchased a “brick” on our walls and 2) it should indeed help with our fund raising efforts. This is the least obnoxious, most efficient and even fun way I know to ask for donations. On a rare occasion I might send out our Facebook page, although I get turned off when people on Twitter always want to “connect on Facebook.”
Starting in the next few weeks, I will also occasionally send out notifications about our huge Tweetup hosted by @DabneyPorte and her company Social Marketing Concepts. They are hosting this event in the greater Baltimore area in May and all the proceeds go to Kids Are Heroes.
And from March 17-25 I will send out tweets asking for votes for our founder MaryMargaret, who is a semi-finalist for The “Energizer Bunny Hall of Fame” contest, where if she wins she will receive a scholarship and a sizable donation for Kids Are Heroes.
What I Won’t Tweet
I will not attach bogus hashtags with my tweets just to get more visibility. That would be spamming through your Twitter stream and I’m not the type who would bite the hand that feeds it. Everything will be G rated and hopefully inspiring to your followers as well.
So if you’d like to sign up, here you go. We’d love it if you did. Visit http://justcoz.org/kidsareheroes and click the “Donate a Tweet” button. Each day I do it, JustCoz will send out the tweet I write for everyone. And as a thank you gift, we will grant you one free promotional brick on our JustCoz Wall just for the asking. To opt out, visit the same link, log in with Twitter, and click the “Stop Supporting” link at the top, or you can simply Revoke your JustCoz Twitter connection at any time. Either way I want this to be a positive experience for all. If there ever is any issue, send me a mention @KidsAreHeroes and I will address it as quickly as I can. And again, thanks so much to everyone who is supporting us!!
These days I find myself referencing more and more things that most people haven’t heard of. I guess that’s part of the price you pay to get older.
Anyway, when I was a child (in the 3rd grade) growing up in the suburbs of Montreal, Quebec, I would come home for lunch each day to enjoy some quality time with my mom. I’ll never forgot the wonder of getting a new TV that was actually in color. It seemed as if the whole room even smelled differently. We would watch Hollywood Squares followed by Jeopardy and then I was back off to school.
I have very fond memories of those times. Not sure why a third grader would like those shows, but I sure did. Now enter the reason why I’m mentioning it. We recently launched our Donor Walls, where anyone can buy a square for a small donation and get publicly thanked in return with a link back to their website. It is a fun way for folks to get involved with KAH and get promoted to more than 30,000 Twitter followers and Facebook fans for a very small donation. The Hollywood Squares show would have a “secret square” where if you chose it and got the answer right you would win extra prizes.
We decided we would incorporate the same thing. Behind one of the squares in our Foundation Wall is a secret square where, if you have purchased it, you will win special prizes. Once all the squares are filled we will film MaryMargaret drawing a square out of a hat and whoever has purchased that square will be the winner. Since we have some time before all that happens, we are also soliciting for donations to add to the list of prizes. Maggie, one of our heroes, has generously donated one of her bracelets (worth $25) to the cause. We will also add KAH wristbands, a piggy bank and a T-shirt. This will be great PR for whoever donates goods to the square as well as for folks buying squares on our wall. We are going to keep a running list of items on this blog post which will mean that this post will be featured prominently and many times over.
So think of something that can be easily shipped to anyone, anywhere and is something truly of value. And we thank those who have generously purchased a square. Let us know if someone found you through our wall. Contact us here if you would like to donate something.
That sounds dramatic, doesn’t it? What I’m referring to is a new discovery in the realm of fund raising. I’ve openly admitted this has been the biggest challenge Kids Are Heroes has faced to date. My palms start to sweat when I think about asking for money. I’m simply not good at it. Period.
So when I saw this new idea (at least new to me) I said to myself, “I have to get that for our site!”. I stumbled across something I thought was called the Support Wall. Since I heard about that someone else told me about the new Promo Wall. The basic idea is that people buy squares on the wall for a relatively little amount of money. They can be in denominations of $25, $10 or even $5. What makes it interesting is that for that little amount they get to purchase real estate on that wall that can be used to promote their business or non-profit. The square can be hyperlinked to their web site, Twitter or Facebook account, or wherever they want it to go. They can even have a message that pops up when the mouse hovers over the image. So I couldn’t wait to sign up. The problem was that these sites weren’t going to be ready for a month or so. I loved the idea so much I built our own on the Kids Are Heroes site. We call it our Foundation Wall. People can buy three different kinds of “bricks”. 100x100px spaces are $25, 50×50 are $10 and 25×25 are just $5. Check it out in all of its glory here.
Why I feel so strongly about why this would be beneficial to us is because we are giving true value for their tiny investments. Between Facebook and Twitter we can invite more than 30,000 people to go to this page as often as we want to. We have our own traffic to send to it. It’s actually fun to see who is up on the wall and why they bought a square. We often think that $5 is so little so why won’t people donate it? The reason is because it’s too much trouble and normally you get nothing in return. Everyone’s asking for just a small donation. But If I can give $5 for a plug and a link back to my site while helping a charity on a page that will get lots of traffic, why wouldn’t I do that?
So I am encouraged by our first square purchased right away and a promise of another. (As this was being written another $25. square was also gobbled up.) It remains to be seen how successful it will be, but on paper it should be amazing. It encourages people to buy early as if they do they will be on the wall for a longer period of time. Our wall has a capacity of raising $2500 for us and when it gets filled we simply start another. There is virtually no cost to us yet the squares offer real value to our donors.
So, in the indomitable words of Peter Marshall, pick a square!!
Update 3/03/11: Well the Foundation Wall got off to a GREAT start. We sold 5 big squares last night and the reviews were very positive. This gave me another idea. Why not build a second wall for corporations? The bricks would be a bit more expensive but they would be up longer as this wall won’t get populated as fast. And at $100 for the most expensive square it’s still very reasonable. So the corporate wall is up and we have already sold 2 $100 squares!! Looks like we might be on to something…
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I am quite surprised at myself for taking so long to write about this subject, as I have been grappling with it since Kids Are Heroes was conceived. Publicity is a good thing, right? That’s what I keep telling myself. Boy if we could just get on Oprah or Ellen or whatever show then so many more people would know about us and we would be able to affect so many more lives. We would get so many more donations we wouldn’t need to ask for money any more. As I hear myself talk I still believe that to some extent. To be honest I get flustered with the whole process. In the beginning we had two PR people work with us. One had us “very close” to being on the Today show and the other told me that our message wasn’t clear enough. Needless to say the Today show didn’t work out and although other people have told me that our message is clear, that statement has stuck with me and I do believe that at least now it is crystal clear.
