Marketing Communications

546 CHAPTER 15 E-COMMUNICATION

effective at achieving a steady level of growth from 5000 to

19 000. Figure 15.4 shows the gender, age and geographic

spread of the Facebook audience. Facebook cultivated an

engaged audience with a deeper interest in the subject

than other platforms. It might be assumed that the best

supporters of a campaign were those on Facebook. To actively

engage members, it was important to provide interactive

content.

The Global Fund launched a Causes page and petition to

increase referrals to the Born HIV Free campaign and pro-

vide a means through which people could sign up without

leaving the Facebook platform. Causes is the world’s largest

platform for activism and philanthropy. The platform

empowers individuals to create grassroots communities

called ‘causes’ that take action on behalf of a specific issue

or non-profit organisation. In addition, through associated

Causes to the Global Fund, over 100 000 supporters in

related Causes (namely, Product RED and Join RED) were

messaged at various times during the campaign. The total

reach of this tool was 129 000 members in 22 affiliate

causes and 48 662 members of the Born HIV Free cause

were created, resulting in 143 858 signatures and more

than 10 000 video views. Causes was a very effective plat-

form for raising awareness of the campaign and collecting

signatures. The Born HIV Free campaign benefited from a

close relationship with the staff of Causes who helped to

promote the campaign to huge existing groups. In addition,

the platform provided the means to message an engaged

audience of almost 250 000 members. During the cam-

paign the Causes platform became increasingly popular

with members sharing videos with each other. Many videos

gained the majority of their views through this platform.

Causes recently became the first platform to have application

news contents included in the news feeds of the members.

This represents further opportunities in the future to grow

the audience and spread campaign messages further than

before.

By working with Twitter the campaign team wanted to

persuade millions of members, many of whom would not

be aware of the Global Fund mission, to run the largest

Figure 15.4 Geographic, gender and age spread of the Facebook audience

M15_PELS3221_05_SE_C15.indd 546M15_PELS3221_05_SE_C15.indd 546 6/6/13 8:55 AM6/6/13 8:55 AM