And it worked.
In a world that can feel increasingly divided, every individual action of solidarity, of peace, of lending a hand and supporting your community counts — no matter how big or small it may seem. As the world’s largest humanitarian network, we know this collective local action has a massive global impact.
Every year our network celebrates International Volunteer Day on December 5th — but this year just struck different. Red Cross and Red Crescent volunteers from around the world faced the pandemic from the front lines. Volunteers were in the community providing physical and mental support to tens of millions of people around the world.
In attempt to grasp the enormity of what they’ve achieved this year, we asked our volunteers to take the stage. Over 150 volunteers from 150 countries around the world signed up to take part in our 24-hour LIVE session that took place on TikTok, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.
And boy did they deliver…here were some of the highlights:
Apparently our viewers LOVED it.
829,000 views on TikTok with up to 1,100 people viewing at one time.
On Facebook — our transmission cut every 8 hours, but we reached about 50K people each time — totalling a reach of about 200K people.
The purpose of the LIVE was not only for the public to hear their amazing stories of what it meant to be a volunteer in 2020, but also for the volunteers themselves. Time and time again volunteers mentioned throughout the 24-hours how much it meant for them to be part of a global network.
DONATIONS
Was it a failure? No way.
Another element of the campaign was fundraising. For the first time during a digital campaign, we were able to collect donations through social. This was a HUGE accomplishment for us and required weeks of internal approvals. TikTok donations were being accepted during the entire 24 hour LIVE. Once we pressed that ‘Go LIVE’ button — we were so excited to see the funds channeling in for volunteer healthcare. But, unfortunately, that didn’t happen. The amount we raised was minimal but what we learned and how we prepared ourselves for our next campaign eclipsed the lack of donations. Here’s what we learned:
- Go LIVE natively in TikTok — We were LIVE across multiple platforms, so the TikTok experience was not optimal
- Engage your TikTok audience constantly! Talk to your viewers. Call them out by screen name. Ask them questions and give them shout-outs with their answers. Without this — there’s no chance for success.
- Have a clear fundraising goal — This is something that we didn’t make known. It gives everyone something to work toward.
- If possible, incorporate well-known celebrities/influencers — traffic, traffic, traffic
- The ask should be time-sensitive — ie. during an emergency appeal
MEDIA
Globally, Red Cross and Red Crescent societies around the world saw hundreds of thousands of new volunteer sign ups.
International Volunteer Day tends to be a very internal celebration. But this year, we wanted to make the day known to people outside of our network. We did that by highlighting the amazing increase of number of volunteer sign-ups around the world. And this was our pitch to traditional media outlets such as Devex.
UNTIL NEXT YEAR
One of our targets for our campaigns is to engage as many Red Cross and Red Crescent societies as possible — and this one DOUBLED the average engagement. Nevertheless, we couldn’t get all of our 192 local Red Cross and Red Crescent societies on the line — but we were able to capture them all here:
