#Felinethropy #GiveRightMeow

December 1, 2015 varhodes
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digital media, philanthropy, projects, public relations, video, writing

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For a 24-hour period in May 2015, cats took over Eastern Virginia Medical School’s digital media. But it wasn’t the cat-tastrophe you might expect. This friend-raiser/fundraiser used cat memes to increase the total number of gifts and garner additional exposure for EVMS during the 2015 757GiveLocal annual event.


In 2014, EVMS participated in the regional Give Local 757 online campaign with the goal of raising money for the school’s annual fund. Using typical social media posts and email for our 2014 participation, our efforts attracted only four gifts for a total of $5,200. One of those gifts was for $5,000 and, thus, somewhat anomalous. The four Facebook posts employed in 2014 reached 1,495 people and garnered only 14 likes, comments or shares. That meant we needed a new strategy for 2015 — one that sought to friend-raise as well as fundraise.

On top of the desire to attract philanthropic dollars, we wanted to increase awareness of EVMS. Over the past two years, while facing intensified budget pressures for the school overall, our advertising budget had been cut significantly. And, we had been advised to expect another similar cut in advertising for the coming fiscal year. As a result, we have increasingly been looking to public relations efforts to increase public awareness of our mission and community impact. While we cannot replace the sheer volume of impressions lost due to paid advertising cuts, any additional impressions would help offset that deficit.

We decided to employ the purr-fect strategy. Catvertising. It’s a thing. Really. Just think: Grumpy Cat, LOLcats, or I Can Has Cheezburger? We thought there might be a way to take our guilty pleasure and turn it into a bona fide strategy. We knew Facebook would be the core of our campaign. But we wanted to use all the digital tools at our disposal. Thus, we planned to write alternate versions of our messages that could be posted on Facebook and Twitter. Print and digital signage would be used across campus to direct viewers online. HTML emails would alert key off- and on-campus audiences to our efforts.

We consider the #Felinethropy #GiveRightMeow campaign a success — especially given the low cost for producing it. We increased from 4 gifts in 2014 to 21 gifts in 2015 — a 425 percent increase. While we did not exceed the total funds raised in the previous year,  we raised $1,995. Setting aside the anomalous single gift of $5,000 from 2014, we are pleased with these results.

We wildly exceeded our expectations in terms of increasing the number of impressions and viewers for our messages . We have 3,995 people who like our Facebook page. For this campaign, a total of 20,971 unique users saw our 21 posts combined. Of that total, 74 percent of that reach was organic (as opposed to paid via three boosted posts). That translated into a total of 37,219 total impressions combined for all the Facebook posts. Of that total, 85 percent was organic.Whereas our four posts in 2014 earned only 14 likes, shares or comments on Facebook. In 2015, we garnered 514 likes, shares and comments — a significant increase.

Our six cat videos accrued a total of 3,916 views with 69 percent of that total being organic. The videos averaged 26 seconds in length and the average viewing time clocked in at 13.6 seconds. Our meta-commentary LinkedIn posts (seven total) resulted in an additional 2,984 impressions. Our LinkedIn page has 2,512 followers. Due to a problem with our social media monitoring application for Twitter, we were unable to track the full reach and engagement achieved via retweets. However, with 2,600 followers we know our 21 messages generated at least 54,600 impressions. This number is likely higher.

Given the $50 price tag for the campaign we consider this effort to have delivered a significant return on investment.


  • EVMS was named a finalist for a 2016 PRSA Silver Anvil Award in the Community Relations (Government) category. Winners to be announced in June 2016.
  • EVMS was named the grand-prize winner for PR Daily’s national Digital PR & Social Media Awards for the #Felinethropy #GiveRightMeow campaign.
  • The project also was recognized as a finalist in the PR News’ 2015 Digital PR Awards in the Social Networking Campaign category. Other finalists included the ALS Association for its ice bucket challenge and the United Nations Foundation.