Case Study: Guardian's #dollar4oakland

 

Opportunity

Guardian gym is a 501c3 nonprofit that offers free jiu-jitsu, boxing and kickboxing lessons, as well as healthy food and after-school tutoring to Oakland youth. Typically their adult programs cover the cost of their free youth program, but demand for their services had outgrown the size of their facility, and they were looking to raise funds to open a second, bigger facility.

 

 

Approach

In the spirit of inclusion and community (values that are at the core or Guardian’s mission), we wanted to create a campaign that anyone in Oakland could participate in. The population of Oakland is 420,000, which happened to be roughly the amount of money Guardian needed to raise to finish their renovations on the new facility.

 

It occurred to us that if every person in Oakland donated one dollar, the gym could meet their goal.

 

We launched a social media campaign using the hashtag #dollar4oakland.  We encouraged people to post photos of themselves holding a dollar and using the hashtag to show their commitment to Guardian and the city of Oakland. Users were also asked to tag friends to challenge them to donate a dollar as well and to spread the campaign. We kicked off the campaign with an open house/art show at the new facility.

 

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Results

In the first week of the campaign raised over $50,000.  To date, only a month into the campaign, Guardian is one-third of the way to its goal.  The #dollar4oakland campaign has been used almost 200 times on Instagram.

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