Z-Blog

While running Blogging for a Cause campaign we observed a number of different approaches how charities and non-profits pitch their fans to promote their causes. Most sucessful ones share quite a few traits between them:

1. Give your supporters a simple task. In our case, instructions along the lines of:

I support [charity], because of [your reason].

This will give your readers a way to start and prevent excuses for not writing due to writers block. You can even go a step further in provide examples of recent actions to further inspire them.

2. Explain the rules and what they have to do to have their vote count. For Blogging For A Cause challenge:

Write a blog post until 6th of July and make sure to include the signature text in to to have your vote count:

This blog post is part of Zemanta’s “<a href=”http://www.zemanta.com/bloggingforacause/”>Blogging For a Cause</a>” campaign to raise awareness and funds for worthy causes that bloggers care about.

3. Make it easy to spread the word inside your community. You can make it a meme and tag your community or create email template that your supporters can use to notify their friends. Example template from Global Voices Advocacy reads:

Dear Friend,
You’ve probably heard about bloggers being arrested or tortured in different countries, or websites being censored unjustly. It’s something I feel we really need to take a stand against as bloggers.

One of the few groups that works directly with global bloggers on the frontlines of free speech is Global Voices Advocacy. It’s a blog run by Sami ben Gharbia, who is himself a blogger in exile, together with a great community of authors.

We have an opportunity to help Global Voices Advocacy win $3000 $1200 simply by writing a post in our own blogs and inserting the short text you can copy on this page:

Let’s do it!?

Best,
Your friend

Just add the link to the example blog post or yours or to the call to action from charity and send away. Getting an email from someone you know makes it more likely for you to take action and as a consequence more people spread the word.

That’s it! Publish a blog post with these helpful actionable items and spread the word about it on different social networks like Twitter and Facebook. This will give you better participation rates and with this wider spread of knowledge about your cause as well as a better chance of getting part of the challange prize.

Blogging for a cause is a joint campaign between Zemanta and Social Innovation Greenhouse @ Weber Shandwick.

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