Mu Tau Mu of Alpha Chi Omega

With a heartfelt thank you to everyone who participated in our social media experiment, this award is for you (especially our CWRU AXO sisters @ElyseM @amy_z and @flowerstrewn who did not miss a single week in the 6 months of the project!). [We look forward to thanking all Twitter participants in a follow up post next week - thank you #CharityTuesday tweeters!]

From our application: 

In May 2009, we launched a 26-week long pilot project with the following goals:

-          to promote domestic violence awareness in real time;

-          to educate Alpha Chi Omegas and the general public about issues related to DVA and other causes important to Alpha Chi Omega and Alpha Chi Omega Foundation;

-          to give our members who are active in social media an opportunity to “live our Alpha Chi Omega values” in a very real and timely way.

-          to illustrate how involved Alpha Chi Omega is in real-life issues and to break down stereotypes about sorority women.

We recruited sisters active on Twitter to join a facebook group so we could email weekly announcements, which were then cross-posted to our MTM blog and the facebook group discussion page. As the group grew, so did participation. We also took the logical step of including instructions for everyone to participate on Facebook and their personal blogs in addition to (or instead of on) Twitter.

Charity Tuesday started out strong on May 12 on Twitter with 28 participants. That first “message” (thanking Alpha Chi Omega Foundation for their work to end domestic violence) reached an audience of 10,189.

Over the weeks, we promoted our domestic violence awareness partners (like the Give Respect! Campaign), applauded our collegiate chapters, celebrated the first White House Advisor on Violence Against Women, and mourned the passing of long-time DVA advocate Farrah Fawcett. We made a lot of friends on Twitter – women and men whose work to end domestic violence humbles us all. And we learned some lessons.

One lesson came out of our most popular week. By popular, we mean we reached the largest audience. We shared a short film called Cut, starring Keira Knightley (Pirates of the Caribbean, Atonement) directed by Joe Wright (Atonement, The Soloist). In the UK it was labeled too violent for television. We asked people to watch the video and vote in a poll. That week the video was viewed 4,848 times. Our poll had 100 voters: 7 thought the film was too shocking; 92 did not. The lesson we learned was that the more interactive our weekly project, the better! We had a stack of comments on the poll as well, so adding that was a good experiment.

One of our other successes of the pilot project was the member drive we hosted for the Foundation Cause on facebook. It led to Alpha Chi Omega Foundation having the second most members among all the other NPC Foundation groups on facebook Causes! We also encouraged donations and are happy to report Alpha Chi Omega is #1 in this category!