Lessons on the 48-hour Twitter Tree campaign
Howard Lake | 5 March 2009 | Blogs
Last month The Woodland Trust used Twitter for a 48-hour campaign to support the appeal against the Government’s plans for increased passenger numbers at Stansted.
Rather than feature the updates from one of the Trust’s campaigners, they suggested that a tree had taken over their head of campaigns’ Twitter account at ‘EdWoodlandTrust‘, thereby becoming the first ‘tree’ to use Twitter.
As part of the campaign EdWoodlandTrust turned up outside the High Court, and the whole campaign achieved good media coverage.
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Jon Parsons, E-Communications Manager at The Woodland Trust, yesterday shared the lessons of the campaign via the charitywebmanagers forum. Jon and The Woodland Trust have for years been innovative and effective users of digital media, and Jon has often shared his experiences with other charities.
Jon has kindly given permission for me to share his lessons here:
"We made the Twitter profile take on the persona of a tree to cover the photo call outside the High Court in London where we were attending dressed as trees. The idea was to build some excitement online about the event. We thought this would be a good introduction to Twitter for the organisation and didn’t expect any pick up from the media this time, but to create a sense that this might be an interesting thing for them to follow next time.
Approximately 50 tweets were submitted over the course of 36 hours related to the event.
Benefits
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Involved us in a platform which is of the moment
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Gave us the opportunity to keep excitement going around a photo call over more than just the usual half hour or so
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We were able to hit a new audience of opinion formers with our messages
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Using the experiences of others on Twitter eg Atheist Bus Campaign we tweeted as a tree as opposed to an individual. Doing this created excitement from fellow people on Twitter to the extent that my followers went from about 25 on the Friday before to 175 by the end of the day on Tuesday.
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These followers re-tweeted several of the tweets which meant we hit a much wider audience than just those 175 including for example @Greenpep (995 followers) @jonworth (276 followers), @elspethmurray (345 followers) @equaliser (76 followers), PlanetPositive (1,100 followers), @WorldlandTrust (109 followers) @fairsay (114) and a #followfriday promotion for my feed from @PlanetPositive (1,110)
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Some of these feeds were picked up by some bloggers and bookmarked on delicious etc
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This event gave us the opportunity to build an audience for our tweeting which gives us a good platform on which to build.
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The tweets give us an archive of what the day was which I then transferred to our blog as a blog story to back up the summary on the blog.
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It gave us the chance to deliver media including photos and video unmediated directly to a group of opinion formers
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We had a positive response to a re-tweet from Adam Vaughan who is environment sub editor at the Guardian, we also had some positive comments from various people on Twitter who liked what we were doing."
Where’s the tree now? He has now given up his control of the account, so Ed Pomfret, head of campaigns at the Woodland Trust, now has his Twitter account back. Pomfret promises that the tree will be back.
http://wtcampaigns.wordpress.com/category/aviation/
About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.