Patiently waiting...plus some metrics...plus a big thanks!

After weeks of quiet preparation and days of rounding-up and planning a campaign, yesterday I once again led the charge for an online voting campaign for The Hope Institute. So as I patiently wait results on this Sunday Morning, I thought I would share a few thoughts and some numbers.


I'm astounded by the response that we had from our community, supporters and parents. My biggest fear as I woke up on Saturday morning was that the event was taking during a Holiday Weekend, during the summer, and that I had noticed other charities, that had also won Pepsi grants, lose in previous days. However, at the end of the day, weeks of preparation, boots on the ground at events throughout the community, and the relationships we have forged nationwide, combined to carry us to an astonishing 48% of the total vote as the competition closed.

In the coming days, I will be sharing some background into our planning for this event and providing some insight into our campaign metrics. For now, I would like to thank our friends and voting groups from around the nation and provide some early numbers on how we were able to raise awareness.

• Twitter - Over the course of 2 days, our core supporters and networks included our custom created bit.ly link in more than 100 tweets reaching an audience of more than 600,000 twitter users.
• Facebook - Our custom created bit.ly link was shared more than 1,600 times, and shared through Facebook's "Like" feature an addition 825 times.
• More than 760 people commented on that custom link.

Please note that the above numbers only represent the number of times that our community shared the custom link that I created to help measure and monitor our outreach efforts, along with providing a direct link for smartphone users to use. Those numbers do not include the sharing metrics from our websites and content posted directly from the Toyota Application.

As voting wrapped up last night, the only thought running through my head, was that of gratitude for our community of supporters and network of do-gooders who went out there way during a holiday weekend to help a local charity.

Thank You to everyone who not only helped Hope to earn a new accessible minivan, but as importantly, for the incredible amount of awareness that you created yesterday.