CASE 15 547digital petition ever undertaken on Twitter. To achieve this,
Twitter’s support was gained by means of promoted tweets,
free media space on Twitter profiles, consultancy (using
Twitter’s expertise and advice to mobilise an audience
around emotive causes), suggested User List (to be added
to the Suggested User List for Twitter under charities and
under staff picks), promotion on Twitter.com/blog, coverage
in the monthly newsletter, outreach to top Twitter members,
staff champions of the cause, etc. Twitter appeared to be
not the appropriate tool for engagement and it quickly
became evident that it would not be a major online com-
munications channel. Therefore, only limited resources and
efforts were allocated to Twitter after the launch.Bloggers
Bloggers are hugely influential and command large audiences.
These audiences are usually more engaged and feel more
connected with a blogger than with a traditional journalist.
The endorsement of popular bloggers can start an avalanche
of attention and build momentum for campaign efforts.
The Global Fund organised a Born HIV Free competition for
bloggers with the possibility for the winner to visit Global-
Fund-supported programmes with the objective of bringing
the blogger closer to the organisation. The more a blogger
feels influenced by a campaign and likes the people involved,
the more likely the blogger will post positively about the
event.
Seven bloggers from the USA, Canada, Spain, Germany
and France came to Lesotho for a three-day trip, visiting
hospitals and interviewing pregnant women on PMTCT
treatment and HIV-positive mothers having HIV negative
children. The number of posts related to the trip was 38
(10 German, 10 Spanish, 9 French, 7 Canadia, 2 American).
Most bloggers wrote and posted a story almost every day,
which ensured transparency and continuous follow-up for
the readers. The invited bloggers felt part of the campaign
and became its ambassadors.Conclusions
In terms of the main objectives of the campaign, i.e. increase
public awareness, traffic and petition-signing, the Born HIV
Free campaign was a success. However, the campaign failed
to enhance the Global Fund brand.
One of the biggest challenges of running a digital-based
campaign with media vehicles and social media platforms
as stakeholders is to decide what to do with traffic: that is,
either to drive campaign traffic to one central place or to
diversify and have many hubs; to drive traffic to your site,
or to go where the traffic is. The campaign officially had
three online hubs to gather signatures of support: the
campaign website, the campaign YouTube channel, and the
campaign Causes page on Facebook. Each proved to be
useful in helping to achieve the Global Fund’s campaignobjectives, but in a segmented way. The campaign website
kept users on it the longest and converted the highest rate
of petition-signers, while the YouTube channel enjoyed the
highest amount of traffic (around 20 million visits) and
therefore brand exposure, but did not convert visitors to
petition-signers at a high rate (0.001%). The campaign Causes
page on Facebook collected the most petition signatures,
but did much more to expose the issue of prevention of HIV
from mother to child than the Global Fund brand.
With the Born HIV Free campaign, the Global Fund
made a conscious choice to push an issue rather than its
brand in the campaign’s core DNA. More than anything,
the Born HIV Free campaign was about putting the attain-
able goal of an HIV-free generation by 2015 on the agenda.
The downside to this is that the Global Fund was not able
to create the same impact on raising its brand awareness.
Only a few of the campaign aware spontaneously made
the connection between the Global Fund and Born HIV
Free. The campaign was huge and complex due to its
length, the large number of partners, and different goals:
signatures vs traffic. The Global Fund brand did not benefit
from the campaign. This was mainly due to the incredibly
complicated brand landscape of the campaign. During the
most highly publicised moments of the campaign, the
Global Fund essentially squared itself off against the cam-
paign brand – Born HIV Free, the brand of its spokesperson,
Carla Bruni-Sarkozy – and its committed commercial partner,
YouTube. This crowded and complicated brand architecture
of the campaign proved to be a diluting factor for the Global
Fund brand, and made it difficult for even the campaign
aware to connect the dots. The most obvious conclusion
one would likely draw from the results of the survey with
‘chattering classes’, shown in Figures 15.5 and 15.6 , is
that the Global Fund simply did not create a strong enough
connection between its brand and the campaign.
After the Born HIV Free campaign, the conclusion is that
driving traffic to a controlled own platform like a website,
while pro moting on the platforms where the traffic is, like
Facebook or YouTube, is the formula that will help achieve
the campaign’s goals, while creating maximum brand impact.
The segmentation of web traffic for the Born HIV Free
campaign was accepted by the Global Fund as an inherent
compromise to be able to engage as many partners as
possible. But the Global Fund is using this as a lesson-
learned after seeing the impact that Born HIV Free had
on raising awareness for an issue, while leaving the brand
of the organization as an afterthought. At the moment
with their current digital-based campaign, ‘One Million
Lives’, the Global Fund is being disciplined about driving
traffic to one central place, the campaign website, where
they can have complete control over their brand exposure
to users, even though it means not being able engage
with partners in the same capacity that they did with Born
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