Nationwide Cause Marketing with Twitter

Mash up a telethon, the nationwide live showing of an earnest documentary film about three women fighting poverty in their respective countries, CARE, ONE, Fathom, and Twitter, and what do you get?

We've seen local and regional Tweet-a-Thons, but this will apparently be the first-ever nationwide sponsored Tweet-a-Thon.

From Tuesday, March 3 to Thursday March 5 when you Twitter with the phrase “#apowerfulnoise” in your Tweet, National CineMedia Fathom will make a $0.10 donation per CARE, up to 50,000 tweets, a rather modest $5,000.

The event culminates on Thursday, March 5 with the showing of the film “A Powerful Noise” at 450 movie theaters across the United States. The film will be followed by a live panel discussion that includes the likes of Christy Turlington Burns, Nicholas Kristof, Dr Helene Gayle, Madeleine Albricht, and Natalie Portman. You can submit a question to the panel here.

The documentary was produced by Sheila Johnson, a Global Ambassador for CARE, and cofounder of BET with her former husband Robert Johnson. She has a long list of other firsts including, it’s said, bragging rights as the first black female billionaire. (Oprah was the second, but she has since surpassed Johnson).

This is a pretty cool idea and I can imagine a lot of directions you could take starting with this approach.

But I cannot imagine a way in the world that the panel discussion doesn’t turn out to be a yawner. Either the film does its job or it doesn’t. But the addition of a panel discussion on the heals of the movie will neither mitigate a bad documentary or improve a good one.

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