Today I came across a clever new twitter application that offers people the chance to donate the remaining characters from their tweets in order to raise awareness of the charity Help for Heroes.
It is all part of a wider campaign called https://www.hashtags4heroes.com/. The campaign has been created for the whole month of May (which in PR terms is Military Appreciation Month) to raise awareness for Wounded Warrior Project (WWP) and injured service members.
Every time a user tweets during the time period, the application will autofill any unused Twitter characters with messages that help spread the word about their charitable services.
What I love about this is they are using something which is free to raise awareness of a particular message at a particular time. It’s a great example of a clever idea executed brilliantly. They have even created browser plug-ins and a dedicated mobile application.
They have set a target of 300,000 characters donated by May 31st 2012 but I think they will smash that as at the day of writing they have already secured 148,000.
The reason why I like this idea is because it is simple but it is PR and social media combined to deliver a multi-platform campaign. I would love to work for a charity on something like this and I tip my hat to the guys that came up with it. I have even tweeted my support – great campaign well done.
Chris Norton is the founder of Prohibition and an award winning communications consultant with more than twenty years’ experience. He was a lecturer at Leeds Beckett University and has had a varied PR career having worked both in-house and in a number of large consultancies. He is an Integrated PR and social media blogger and writes on a wide variety of blogs across a huge amount of topics from digital marketing, social media marketing right through to technology and crisis management.