PARTICIPANT MEDIA: TAKEPART

Credits & Description:

Category: Best Use of Social Media Marketing

Advertiser: PARTICIPANT MEDIA

Product/Service: SOCIAL NETWORK

Agency: OGILVY WEST

Date of First Appearance: Mar 15 2009 12:00AM

Entrant Company: OGILVY WEST, Culver City, USA

Entry URL: http://awardssubmissions.com/takepart

Co-President/Chief Creative Officer: Dan Burrier (OgilvyWest)

Co-President: Heather MacPherson (OgilvyWest)

Executive Creative Director: Peter Kang (OgilvyWest)

Group Creative Director: Johann Conforme (OgilvyWest)

Director of User Experience: Henry Kuo (OgilvyWest)

Associate Creative Director: Sam Bergen (OgilvyWest)

Marketing Technology Director: Helen Jen (OgilvyWest)

Senior Art Director: Fiel Valdez (OgilvyWest)

Producer: Alicia Welsh (OgilvyWest)

Group Account Director: Danielle Keany (OgilvyWest)

Developer: Mekanism

Media placement: Web Site - www.takepart.com - 15/03/2009



Results and Effectiveness

TakePart’s sole purpose is to move the needle on social change. After the launch, we achieved that. The SEO strategy started to bring in considerably more traffic to TakePart, and fans and activists alike started to spread the word in the blogosphere. Our combined efforts were able to increase monthly unique visitors to the site by over 400% (Alexa). This resulted in the creation of an active and growing online community dedicated to social action and real change.
“Never doubt that a group of committed citizens can change the world. It is the only thing that ever has.” Margaret Mead.



Creative Execution



Building a social network from the ground up is no easy task. We knew we had to excite people, give them a completely unique experience, and create a place where a new community could prosper. We engaged with focus groups across the country to hone what content and interactivity people wanted on a community site dedicated to social action. And then we did user testing on a variety of layouts, interfaces, and designs. In the end, we combined the best attributes from blogs and informative list sites (Digg, Teddit, etc) to give people both a content-rich experience and the ability to quickly scroll and learn more. Since TakePart had no advertising budget, we created a strong search engine optimisation (SEO) strategy, optimised the site for social sharing, and worked diligently to make sure that the content and community would generate positive word of mouth.



Insights, Strategy & the Idea

By 2008, Participant Media had moved millions of people with films like An Inconvenient Truth, Darfur Now, and Syriana, to name a few. But after people left the theatre, there was no simple way to get involved in the cause they just learned about. So we created TakePart, a social action network that mixes content, community, causes, and action into one neat little package. By joining TakePart, individuals and non-profit organisations become part of a networked social media hub. All connected to facilitate collaboration, promote causes, and pool resources to create real change in real communities.