I assume that most of us reading this are currently working on big integrated marketing campaigns for big companies in our 541 sections. These campaigns might involve television ads, billboards, a social media presence, the whole enchilada — but they’re all theoretical, a class assignment with pretend money on the line. However, I recently witnessed an extremely successful and extremely small-scale integrated marketing campaign that any of us could pull off in our real lives, and I think it makes an interesting case study.
I live in Davis, CA, and work at the University of California, Davis. It’s a smallish town, about 60,000 people, a large percent of which are students. About a month and a half ago, I was downtown getting some coffee, and I noticed a flier posted on every street corner. In large, bold font, it read at the top: “PLEASE HELP!“, with a photo of a smiling young girl and her dog below.
Beneath the photo was a short bit of text explaining that the girl is a college student with limited funds but her dog needed surgery soon or might lose the ability to walk, followed by a call to action to please contribute to the girl’s Gofundme campaign.
Because my own dog had a similar problem a few years ago, I knew how expensive that surgery can be and I went home and looked up the Gofundme. The weird thing about the flier was that it didn’t include a URL, it just directed people to search on Gofundme for “Mayhem’s Surgery.” Once I found the page, I understood why — the girl had made a typo and the actual URL was gofundme.com/mayhams-surgery, spelling the dog’s name wrong. I ended up contributing a small amount and promptly forgetting about it.
Within a week or two, though, I started seeing the fliers everywhere. Everywhere there was a flat surface on campus, there was a flier for Mayhem’s surgery. Any street corner within half a mile of campus had a flier posted somewhere. I didn’t count them all, and the girl running the campaign didn’t reply to my email request for an interview, but I estimate she must have put up at least a couple hundred fliers. The example above is one of six I spotted just on my bike ride home a couple days ago, and it’s managed to stay up through several weeks of heavy rain.
I did some math, and students at UCD get 200 free sheets of printing every quarter, but even if she’d already used her 200, it probably only cost her about $20 at $0.10 a page. It took her maybe a full day of wandering around to put all the fliers up, and even if we value her time at a generous $20/hr, that brings the total cost to about $180. Let’s just round it to $200 total (she probably needed to buy tape).
Well, she had a goal of raising $4,000 for the surgery, and with 80 donations in less than two months, she closed the Gofundme after reaching the full amount. That’s about a 2000% return on her investment.
Fliers asking for help have been around for forever, and I’ve seen lots of Gofundme campaigns posted on social media, but I was surprised that this girl was able to raise so much money in so short a time with some pretty basic advertising concepts and online/offline integration. The top donation was $500 and the next four were around $100, with the vast majority smaller donations of $10 or $20, showing that her strategy of blanketing the town in fliers paid off by reaching dozens of people like me who were just going about their days when they saw a photo of a dog and “PLEASE HELP!“.
And for those wondering, Mayhem is currently out of surgery and doing well.