Social Media and Experiential Marketing Collide with a Cause-Guest Post by Daniel Herndon

I wanted to post the following post. My dear friends, Daniel Herndon and Darren Heil, have vowed to stay in a van until they raise money for a cause. With a press release, a bit of local news initiative, and an entire community of social media advocates, we intend to get them home straitaway. Please read the following post and understand how we take giving and social media to a whole new level. I donated. Will you?

At Redwall LIVE we are always trying to support a good cause, in our personal lives it is no different, but we were looking for really creative ways to do a focused campaign for Non Profit’s whose campaigns we could really connect with. In an effort to give our talents to the community I approached CFI (Community First Initiative) about serving them and putting together an experiential campaign to raise money and awareness for their program that makes a lifelong impact on high school students. They Partner with Schools to provide their 40 developmental assets mentoring program. They welcomed us and we put together the following event. The campaign is  Experiential, Interactive and Involves Social Media in a major way. I’d like to especially thanks Pet Supplies Plus Stores and Deep Ripples: an Organic Search Marketing company for supporting this cause as sponsors.

Darren Heil (Director of CFI) and I (Owner of Redwall LIVE) will be living in a van starting this Wednesday (December 9th 2009)… that is an old 70s chevy van that has nothing but an old couch and a couple bucket seats in it. We’ll be bringing a web cam and a couple laptops with air cards so we can still work, and so we can tweet!

Above us will be a digital billboard that will be displaying frequent updates and directing drive by traffic to take notice of us in the van and donate at www.forkout.org. Forkout.org is “the giving engine of Redwall LIVE”. We created forkout.org merely so we could create experiential events just to support a cause. CFI is the first.

Local Media is covering the event including an article in the IndyStar. Even Mcallisters Deli Restaurants in the Indianapolis area are participating by collecting donations at the counter.

This is really made possible by social media to spread the story virally through pier to pier communication. Social media is a must with Experiential Marketing. We will be interacting with donors and viewers all over the world via twitter and the hashtag #forkout (some tweets will even make it to the billboard). Many will watch the event unfold via webcast at forkout.org. Thanks to bloggers like Kyle Lacy, Lindsay Manfredi and myself the story is finding its way to several popular blog sites and tweeted by many. Twitter Enables us to have real time conversation from people at their desks, in their cars, with their families or at work and connect to thousands of people all over the world. Simultaneously the webcast will invite people at work to watch frequent 9 minute webisodes as well as “a day in the life” through the whole procedure. Blogging shares the story of our cause and our campaign with the world in detail. With all the support and integrated social media, we estimate we will be connecting to over 150,000 people over the course of the 10 day experience.

Our goal is $25,000 in 10 days… we only need 1000 people to donate $25. But consider this. $25,000 is 10% of the annual budget of CFI, so how can we carry this on beyond the 10 days to help students?

Daniel Herndon