The Community Engagement Award – a $25,000 grant – will go to the Challenge finalist* who does the best job of getting their community directly involved in saving more lives during the Challenge.
Shelters don’t save lives, people do! When more people get involved, more lives can be saved. And the more meaningful their involvement, the stronger and more lasting their connection with the shelter and its mission will be.
That’s the whole premise behind the ASPCA Rachael Ray $100K Challenge Community Engagement Award. We’re giving you and your community members a $25,000 incentive to work together in meaningful ways to save more lives. And you win either way – because even better than the money, every community member that you engage becomes an asset that pays life-saving dividends over and over again.
*Only contestants adhering to all Challenge rules and saving at least 300 more cats, kittens, dogs and puppies from August 2012 through October 2012 over the same 3 months in 2011 qualify as potential winners.
Step 1: Engage Your Community
The Challenge offers you all the ingredients of a perfect call to action for getting your community members engaged:
“Help us save more lives and win the $100K Challenge.”
- It’s simple
- It’s desired
- It’s urgent (short-term)
Use this call to action to get your community involved in work that will directly impact saving lives during the Challenge. You might …
- Host a brainstorming session with your current supporters and interested community members to get their ideas about how to save more lives – and to entice them with your ideas
- Increase your recruitment of volunteers and foster families
- Get donors or local businesses to put up additional prizes for meeting your adoption goals
- Expand your offsite adoption venues to new business partners
- Apply for community foundation support
- Run your own contest to see who can design the most creative adoption campaign
- Recruit local techies to develop tech solutions – like lost and found matching
- Train your foster families to find adopters for their foster pets (and while you’re at it, train them to do the adoptions, too!)
- Entice local service groups to compete against each other for helping to save the most lives
- Increase your collaboration with local rescue groups
- Enlist local spokespeople and social media mavens to market your animals for adoption
- Hold a big adoption event – or several
- Get your media to cover everything you do
Still need more ideas? Check out the many ways contestants engaged their communities in the last two Challenges. Here are great tips from the Community Engagement winners of 2010 and 2011.
Step 2: Show Us the Engagement
On your Facebook page, using the hashtag #100KChallenge
To win the Community Engagement Award, you’ll need to provide evidence of your work to get
community members involved.
Use your Facebook page to issue your call to action to the community and to continually report on your progress by using the hashtag #100KChallenge on every Challenge-related post. Highlight all of the ways people are helping you save lives. Post photos and videos about the life saving. Make announcements every time you pass a milestone or break another record – giving credit to the people who helped make it happen. Post links to media coverage. Advertise upcoming events and report on their results. Tell your fans what’s coming next and what help they can provide.
Don’t forget: Use the #100KChallenge hashtag on ALL Challenge-related posts so that your Challenge efforts are pulled over to this website so that all of the work happening around the country can be seen in one place, and so that the Community Engagement judges can evaluate your work.
Events Calendar: Post your events so everyone can see what's coming up.
Step 3: Get Out the Vote
From October 17 to October 31, 2012 send your community members to the Challenge website to vote for your shelter. Community members can vote every day — once per day. On November 15, the three shelters that have increased lives saved by at least 300 and received the most votes will be announced as finalists for the $25,000 Community Engagement Award.
And the Winner Will Be…
The ASPCA Grants Committee will review the Facebook posts and events calendar of the three finalists to determine which contestant did the most to engage their community. Criteria will include:
- numbers and diversity of people involved;
- breadth of ways the community participated to help save lives;
- level of community enthusiasm for saving homeless animals as evidenced by photos, stories, and videos;
- event promotion and event results; and
- media coverage.
The Method Behind This Madness
You might be wondering why you should go to all of this effort (besides the shot at winning a $25,000 grant) to advertise the work you’re doing in the Challenge. Here’s our strategy:
Engaging people is key to saving more lives – and practice makes perfect. As you write about your work, you will not only understand it better and become better at talking about it, but you’ll also be making your community engagement efforts more transparent for your staff and volunteers – so that they can become increasingly more effective at engaging people in your mission.
Keeping energy up is critical. Right now, a three-month Challenge probably seems completely do-able. When you’re in the midst of it, it’s going to seem like a long haul. Reporting on your efforts and achievements will help you and your organization to feel the headway you’re making. Seeing the work of other Challengers will fill you and your staff and volunteers with new ideas and a healthy dose of competitive spirit.
Our field thrives on peer-to-peer learning. Animal welfare professionals love to hear and see what their colleagues are doing and how it’s working. Sharing your work is a real-time way for thousands of professionals to learn and get inspiration. So while you’re saving more lives in your community, you’ll be helping to save more lives in communities across the country!