Social Media Strategy Lessons For A Great Cause

The East Harlem Tutorial Program was 1 of only 17 organizations to be selected to receive additional funds from the Chase Program. We are grateful for all of your Herculean efforts! The East Harlem Tutorial Program emerges from this experience with a greater capacity for social networking, a stronger EHTP community, and $62,000!

- Lauren Goldstein

Director of Development & Communications

East Harlem Tutorial Program

Description:

For more than 50 years, The East Harlem Tutorial Program gives kids the opportunities they would have if they were born 20 blocks south of Harlem. And, they’ve been doing it for more than 50 years. They teach reading and math, provide one-to-one tutoring, prepare kids for college, help them get accepted, and build the social skills they’ll need to succeed. We also get kids through college and ready for the real world.

In East Harlem:

49% of 25+ year olds never graduate high school
10% of 25+ year olds obtained higher than a high school diploma
78% of 18-24 year olds are not enrolled in college
40% of people live below the poverty line

In January of this year, EHTP was named one of the Top 100 in the Chase Community Giving program. This program was a two round program – where out of more than 500,000 charities, EHTP was a top 100 vote earner – giving them $25,000 and qualifying them for Round 2 where they stood to win up to $1 million.

Challenge:

In less than four weeks – and with no marketing budget – use Social Media and online marketing tools to create a groundswell of support for people to vote for EHTP’s “big idea” through Facebook.

Execution:

Imagistic and Big Blue Moose worked hand in hand to create a new blog and Social Media Strategy for EHTP at vote.ehtp.org. The blog would the the mechanism to generate content – and be a landing page for the social media content effort.

Meanwhile, EHTP stepped up in a huge way – engaging staff, students and their network to get the word out. The content strategy was centralized – and a big effort to blog, generate Twitter content, facebook and new videos for the blog paid off in a big way.

The result was:

While EHTP didn’t win the $1 Million, their efforts paid off in a truly meaningful way. They were able to exponentially inrease their online community engagement- leading to a loyal community that they can now communicate with.

Secondarily, the new Blog site was such as success it is now THE Web site for the non-profit.

Measuring Success:

And, finally, and maybe most importantly – through their grass-roots efforts, EHTP was recognized by the Advisory Board. And, out of the Top 100, was picked as 1 of 17 organizations to receive additional funds. Their award was an additional $37,000.

Big Blue Moose was proud to partner with Imagistic on this worthy project.