Skip to main content

Twitterific Cause Marketing

Austin-based HelpAttack! wants to help you use your Twitter superpowers for good.

Sign up and pledge a certain amount per Tweet for a month to the charity of your choice. At the end of 30-days HelpAttack! tallies your Tweets and sends you a bill. Donations are processed and fulfilled through Network for Good.

HelpAttack! has nearly 6,000 charities already in place. It’s a simple matter to add yours if it isn’t already on the list. At this writing, the average pledge per Tweet is $0.28 and the average monthly pledge is about $28.

The idea for HelpAttack! germinated with Sarah Vela, the CEO who posed the classic entrepreneur’s question, what if?

“The idea came to me during last year’s Movember pledge drive,” she says. “There was a lot of activity online in the form of passionate participants asking for support from their friends. I wondered, what if all that activity were the actual donation? What if the act of being online was generating dollars for Movember? What if every Tweet were worth, say, a penny?”

Vela has been involved in social media, podcasting and content strategy for nonprofits and health care companies for more than a decade. Cofounder David J. Neff, the COO, won the American Marketing Association’s Social Media Marketer of the Year in 2009. Ehren Foss, the third cofounder and CTO, is the founder of Prelude Interactive, a web development firm, and a graduate of MIT.

HelpAttack!, a for-profit company targeting Gens-X and Y, employs the classic ‘freemium’ model. The Twitter app is totally free. The company is already producing customized pages with specialized reporting for nonprofits for a fee. HelpAttack! is actively selling to corporations as well.

“Our customers are the nonprofits and corporations that want to take advantage of our platform to reach out to and sustain relationships with younger adult donors through fund raising drives, cause marketing, matching donations, employee fund drives, and the like,” says Vela. “For a one-time fee of $25 and an ongoing payment of 4% from their donations, nonprofits will be able to have their own landing page, a link to direct people to for pledges, and the ability to download donor reports,” she says.

Facebook is next and after that HelpAttack! has its eye on the Internet as a whole.

“You will see us on Facebook within the next couple of months,” she says, “and then we have plans to extend beyond even social networks to the internet at large. If you can count it, you can pledge it. Imagine pledging RSS feeds, Home Runs, calories burned, miles or workouts logged, etc. The site itself will have a more interactive quality in terms of both community aspects and game mechanics.”

I’m not sure if HelpAttack! has its branding right, but Vela, Neff and Foss have developed an interesting niche with plenty of open field on front of them, and I wish them every success.

Comments

Sarah Vela said…
Hi Paul,

Thanks so much for profiling HelpAttack! on your blog. I appreciate your coverage and support, and look forward to any input from your readers about the experience!

Popular posts from this blog

Cause Marketing: The All Packaging Edition

One way to activate a cause marketing campaign when the sponsor sells a physical product is on the packaging. I started my career in cause marketing on the charity side and I can tell you that back in the day we were thrilled to get a logo on pack of a consumer packaged good (CPG) or even just a mention. Since then, there’s been a welcome evolution of what sponsors are willing and able to do with their packaging in order to activate their cause sponsorships. That said, even today some sponsors don’t seem to have gotten the memo that when it comes to explaining your cause campaign, more really is more, even on something as small as a can or bottle. The savviest sponsors realize that their only guaranteed means of reaching actual customers with a cause marketing message is by putting it on packaging. And the reach and frequency of the media on packaging for certain high-volume CPG items is almost certainly greater than radio, print or outdoor advertising, and, in many cases, TV. More to

Why Even Absurd Cause-Related Marketing Has its Place

Buy a Bikini, Help Cure Cancer New York City (small-d) fashion designer Shoshonna Lonstein Gruss may have one of the more absurd cause-related marketing campaigns I’ve come across lately. When you buy the bikini or girls one-piece swimsuit at Bergdorf-Goodman in New York shown at the left all sales “proceeds” benefit Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center . Look past the weak ‘ proceeds ’ language, which I always decry, and think for a moment about the incongruities of the sales of swimsuits benefiting the legendary Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. Cancer has nothing to do swimming or swimsuits or summering in The Hamptons for that matter. And it’s not clear from her website why Shoshanna, the comely lass who once adorned the arm of comedian Jerry Seinfeld, has chosen the esteemed cancer center to bestow her gifts, although a web search shows that she’s supported its events for years. Lesser critics would say that the ridiculousness of it all is a sign that cause-related marketing is

A Clever Cause Marketing Campaign from Snickers and Feeding America

Back in August I bought this cause-marketed Snickers bar during my fourth trip of the day to Home Depot. (Is it even possible to do home repairs and take care of all your needs with just one trip to Home Depot / Lowes ?) Here’s how it works: Snickers is donating the cost of 2.5 million meals to Feeding America, the nation’s leading hunger-relief charity. On the inside of the wrapper is a code. Text that code to 45495… or enter it at snickers.com… and Snickers will donate the cost of one meal to Feeding America, up to one million additional meals. The Feeding America website says that each dollar you donate provides seven meals. So Snickers donation might be something like $500,000. But I like that Snickers quantified its donations in terms of meals made available, rather than dollars. That’s much more concrete. It doesn’t hurt that 3.5 million is a much bigger number than $500,000. I also like the way they structured the donation. By guaranteeing 2.5 million meals, the risk of a poor