Project Description:

The Superhero Foundation's mission is to put a stop child abuse. But in order to solve a problem of this magnitude, you first need to ensure the appropriate level of awareness is raised, and people become educated on the extent of the problem and things that they can do to help solve this problem. So our focus is to drive national awareness through social media campaigns, and family fun-runs that we have developed and operate around the country. The Superhero Run is a family 5k fun run where people of all ages come out for an "awareness run" to celebrate childhood and to raise awareness for National Child Abuse Prevention Month - which is every April. Participants in the run dress up as superheroes for a day of fun, but also as a means to get attention for the awareness campaign. We also raise funds for local abuse shelters. Our guiding principle is that "Every child needs a hero, but abused children need superheroes". 

Project Goal:

Since starting this movement 2 years ago, we have grown from a single run here in Austin, to 3 runs around the country: Austin, Richmond & Pittsburgh. We have also gotten Nike on board as the largest sponsoring company backing this movement. We primarily use social media platforms (Facebook and Twitter) to spread the word, and we now have almost 10,000 people nationally that have joined the cause! We raise money as well through these awareness runs, and have raised over $30,000 to date - and given all of the funds to abuse shelters that need it in the battle against child abuse. Our goal going forward is to become "the Susan G. Komen Foundation" for child abuse prevention. 9 out of 10 people we speak with do not know that April is National Child Abuse Prevention Month...and we are a movement that is going to fix this awareness problem. 

What Tools Did You Use:

Blogs, Facebook, Flickr, LinkedIn, Twitter

What Happened?:

We exceeded early goals that we had from a fund-raising perspective, we exceeded any expectations we had on the sheer number of people who would be part of this cause by leveraging social media to bring people to the cause. We also grew the amount of runs beyond what we expected for the first couple of years "in business". We aspired to grow by one more run understanding that finding the volunteers to pull off this endeavor would be a challenge. When people began to engage us on our Facebook cause and our website, the volunteers and funding to pull off the runs flooded in.

Lessons Learned:

I would go "social" faster and put together a comprehensive social media strategy right from the start - instead of tactically using various social media platforms to get the word out. Building an open/social foundational platform for the movement would have propelled us forward much faster and farther than where we have gotten today. Social media has made all the difference in building this successful movement. 

URLs:

www.superherorun.com

http://apps.facebook.com/causes/117625/9796908?m=71bb3202

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=38990485036&ref=ts

www.Twitter.com/superherorun