Raising Awareness for a Cause through Public Contests

By: Tetiana Hanchar Tetiana Hanchar
Date: Mar 12, 2018
Comment: 0
Category: Awards Management

Believing in a cause is a quality intrinsic to human nature. Nelson Mandela had a strong belief in a free society without racial discrimination; Malala Yousafzai became one of the first Pakistani women who dared to advocate for the rights and freedom of Muslim women. No matter what your age, gender, or social background is, you have causes dear to your heart.

The benefits of raising cause awareness

During their stay in Costa Rica in 2010, Griffin and Paul, two students from California, met two poor bracelet artisans who didn’t have a proper home or enough to eat. By founding the Pura Vida Bracelet campaign, these two American students attracted over 170 partners around the world and have been providing 200+ artisans with steady incomes for years.

Raising cause awareness may be the best way to provide an outlet for life-changing ideas and initiatives. With a strong cause awareness campaign, you can remind both the local and global societies about fundamental healthcare, political, economic, and social problems; educate your community, and build the foundation for addressing a cause.

7 ways of raising cause awareness

If there’s anything you feel strongly about, you should shout it to the world. Here are the top 7 working ideas you can use to raise cause awareness:

Create excellent content

From a short press release to a book, there are many content formats you can use to advance your cause. Relate some influential expert opinions and historic/scientific evidence related to the cause to establish trust; build a website where you can promote the content and establish connections with the media.

Demonstrate your support

You can wear it, write about it, or speak about it at events. The key thing is you have to display your support of the cause. If it flies with your budget, create branded accessories or clothes and distribute them in the target community.

Challenge

If you have a large team or a community of supporters, you can challenge people to do something to attract attention to you cause. Let’s say, the goal of your campaign is closing animal acts in circuses. To demonstrate the circus can be fun without animals, organize a free public performance where everyone can participate doing magic tricks and acrobatics entertaining the audience.

Educate

If your cause can provide the community with some delicious food for thought, it generates much more buzz. Set up a free training, a webinar, or a learning workshop to educate your audience through building awareness about the cause.

Volunteer

If there are other organizations supporting your cause, you can solidify your efforts by doing a joint campaign or building volunteer initiatives together.

Raise funds

From a garage sale to a powerful online campaign, there’s the whole range of fundraising ideas you can leverage to gain support for your cause. Fundraising is a win-win for your organization while it can both increase awareness and generate resources for further promotions.

Organize contests

Raising awareness through public contests is a foolproof approach due to the huge variety of promotion mechanisms, formats, and AMS solutions available on the modern event market. Not only does it kill two birds with one stone by raising funds and building awareness, the contest strategy also brings you brand-new advocacy ideas and visions.

How to set up a public contest for increasing awareness

You can make people flow in simply by making few clicks. The question is what’s the right way to introduce a cause to your contest audience to generate maximum attention. Here’s a step-by-step guide to cause-inspired contest organization:

Plan

Start with “why.” Ask yourself and your team why the cause you’ve chosen is worth advocacy and why this public contest is the best tool for promoting your cause. If there’s no contradiction between these two questions, go ahead and start planning.

When to run a contest. According to Hubspot research, the best times for contests are June and November. If you can fit your contest into these high seasons, you manage to reach a maximum number of people.

What kind of campaign to run? Creative ways to raise brand awareness can be very lucrative. But, you have to choose one format that can perfectly align with your audience’s preferences and goals. Giveaway or promotion, creative contest or a foot traffic campaign, make the choice that resonates with the cause.
Determine a goal. If you’re starting your journey, focus on expanding your list of fans and subscribers. For well recognized campaigns, think how to raise brand awareness rather than cause awareness.
What’s the prize? The perfect formula for a contest prize, in this case, is a value + a reference to a cause.
Contest incentives. Providing instant gratification for entering a contest maximizes the chances users are more likely to share your campaign. Think of a good way to drive on-the-spot actions to make your contest go viral.
Define a budget. The value of raising brand awareness for your cause has a monetary factor. Define your budget to understand what you can afford.
Create a reference point. You won’t be able to understand whether your contest worked if you don’t have clear metrics for measuring it. Set benchmarks for the number of followers you want to get, the average conversion rate, collected funds, etc.
Duration. Campaigns shouldn’t last longer than 6 weeks. People get bored tracking the results of a 2-months long contest. Ideally, a contest keeps people onboard by lasting for 4 weeks as an average.

Ready, steady, go!

Create a dedicated landing page and fill it with contest details. Once you’ve completed planning, start building a place where your contest can shine. To avoid the fuss of hiring developers and designers, use tools like GEVME Website Builder to craft a beautiful event landing page with a few clicks. Add the core details, develop eye-catching headlines, and emphasize CTAs. Voila! You’re all set.
Visuals. To highlight reference to your cause, incorporate some catchy visuals like the image of a prize and diagrams with statistics.
Conditions. Vague and lengthy expressions kill engagement. Using bullet points, relevant links, and simple language clarify the key conditions for entering the contest.

Shout about it

Social networks. What can be better than increasing awareness through contests by taking them to social media? From Facebook to Pinterest, there are many places where your cause contests can shine. Check out this bright Facebook promotion developed by Chaguaramas Amusement Park:
Adwords. If your budget doesn’t scream, you can drive contest entrance through paid advertising using Facebook Ads or Google AdWords.
Email marketing. Promote, remind, confirm, and keep the audience tuned by using email marketing. Through personalized messaging, you won’t lose connections to your community.

Conclusion

Even with a beautiful cause, you won’t be able to expand advocacy if you don’t put vigorous effort into it. Raise awareness through public contests, volunteering initiatives, and challenge campaigns to proclaim your cause with Judgify contest software.