Giving a Hand to Haiti via International Medical Corps

When I heard about the devastating earthquake in Haiti on January 12th, I reached out to our friends over at International Medical Corps to offer a hand.

They agreed, so I started planning a very quick informational blogger outreach.  The purpose of this outreach was to let bloggers around the world know about IMC’s good work and their mission to get doctors in-country to help the injured, hungry, and dehydrated residents of Port au Prince and Haiti in general.

Well, I brought my idea to our Abraham Harrison weekly management team meeting on January 18th and initiated a campaign to deliver a one email outreach to over 9,700 English-speaking bloggers with a very short pitch and a simple plea: please post or tweet about IMC’s mission, here’s a widget if you like, we would love your readers to help.  Here’s the email we used for our January 20th outreach and here’s the email I received:

From: Ellie Brown <ellie@imc-haiti.org>
Subject: Haiti still needs help

Dear Chris,

International Medical Corps is a global, humanitarian, nonprofit organization, founded by volunteer doctors and nurses and dedicated to saving lives and relieving suffering through relief and development programs. Our emergency response team is in Haiti responding in force and I would like to ask for your help to get the word out to the readers of Because the Medium is the Message. There are still thousands of patients seeking treatment of which approximately 80% are in need of surgery and are running out of time – especially with the tremendous aftershocks still devastating this country. The team is treating crush injuries, trauma, substantial wound care, shock and other critical cases with the few available supplies – And they’re in it for the long haul.  I would love your help spreading the word by blogging or tweeting about IMC’s rescue efforts. We’ve put up a blogger friendly widget here on our site:

http://www.imcworldwide.org/haiti

With the widget it’s really easy to let your readers know that donating $10 to help the people of Haiti is as simple as sending a text message of the word “haiti” to 85944. If you have any questions just let me know and I will do my best to help you out. If you are able to post the widget or tweet, I would appreciate it if you could send me the link.

Thanks so much,

Ellie

–
Ellie Brown
International Medical Corps
ellie@imc-haiti.org

If you’ll notice, we were very explicit with what we asked, what we needed.  We also reached out with Ellie Brown’s real name — as we do in all of our campaigns, no false names for us, ever –  but as a representative International Medical Corps.

We act as consultants for our clients so we feel comfortable reaching out as extensions of them on these client-approved campaigns.  Usually the sole link we include in these messages goes to our own  Social Media News Release — see USOC, FAF, OLX, MotionBox, BrandsClub, etc — but in the rush to do this pro bono time-sensitive outreach, we were happy that IMC already had a landing page / microsite developed for the campaign,  http://www.imcworldwide.org/haiti.  Their link was already perfectly useful and met all of the outreach campaign needs.

While we generally do a three wave campaign with two follow-ups emails after the initial ask, in this case time was of the essence, so we just made one single request outreach.

Also, we generally don’t do outreaches as aggressive as the 9,700+ strong outreach we did in this case for IMC — generally closer to 2,000-per-outreach — but I was willing to risk a little because it is a very good, publicly-popular, uncontroversial, humane, and timely historical event and I really wanted the largest and broadest impact possible.

So far in this unique campaign we have been able to log 171 earned media mentions that could be directly connected to our outreach, not secondary or tertiary “echoes.”

Next week, I will post all of the blogs and tweets — 171 — that we have received between the initial outreach on January 20th, when we sent out the request, the ask, and January 26th, when the campaign organically concluded.

Our hearts and prayers go out to the residents of Haiti and to all of those noble folks who are doing good work down there; especially to those who will continue working on rebuilding Haiti and helping Haitians well past the time when the media moves on to something else.  We love International Medical Corps because they always invest in communities long term and that’s what Haiti needs right now: commitment.