Following the phenomenal success this summer of the Ice Bucket Challenge for the A.L.S. Association, which seeks a cure for what is commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, other charities have been longing for their own viral sensations. Now the American Red Cross is introducing a fund-raising effort that, rather than creating videos or spurring supporters to upload theirs, benefits from others’ popular content.
With Bitly, the six-year-old online tool that condenses long web addresses, the Red Cross is introducing Hope.ly, another URL shortener — with a twist. While the Web address for, say, AMC’s “Mad Men,” amctv.com/shows/mad-men, condenses to bit.ly/1vbqSOf, using the new tool shortens it to hope.ly/1yvAdjU. Clicking the Hope.ly link reveals what resembles a banner ad atop the page, proclaiming, “Someone wonderful shared this page — to help people in need through the American Red Cross,” and encouraging donating online.
The new tool will be announced on Tuesday as part of Giving Tuesday, a worldwide effort to encourage supporting charities during the holiday season that was introduced in 2012 by New York’s 92nd Street Y in partnership with the United Nations Foundation. The promotion will run through December.
Hope.ly is the brainchild of BBDO New York, part of the Omnicom Group, which is the agency of record for the Red Cross.
“Charities generally are trying to get large-scale social reach in the same way that the A.L.S. Ice Bucket Challenge did,” said Tom Markham, the executive creative director of BBDO New York. “This idea is kind of in that space, but it’s tied into the act of sharing, as opposed to us trying to come up with the content that is super shareable.”
Introduced in 2008, Bitly has grown rapidly because, along with shortening URLs for character-limited social media like Twitter, it helps users monitor how others subsequently share the links that they share. The company, based in New York, reports that it shortens 600 million links a month, and that those links are clicked on eight billion times.
Laura Maiurano, senior director for digital marketing at Bitly, said the new project was unlike anything the service had done before.
“When BBDO and the Red Cross approached us with this effort, we just thought it was a really great initiative and something new and different and we were totally on board to support it,” Ms. Maiurano said.
A recent survey commissioned by the Red Cross found that among social media users, after seeing a friend’s post about making a donation to a charity, almost 20 percent would also make a donation; 25 percent would donate to a charity if someone in their social network asked them by name to do so.
“The social-media community shows this propensity to give,” said Laura Howe, the vice president for public relations at the Red Cross, “so that tells us it’s a group of people that as an organization we definitely want to be in front of.”
Brian Morrissey, editor in chief of Digiday, an online publication that covers digital marketing and media, noted that unlike brands and charities that often ask consumers to upload photos, complete forms or send e-cards, the Hope.ly effort made participation simple.
“What I like about this is that they’re sort of integrating their marketing campaign into what people are already doing online,” Mr. Morrissey said. “The idea of converting URLs in a small way into messages of hope and charity during the holiday season is really smart and clever.”
But he added that the donation message, which takes up nearly half of the screen for a smartphone held vertically, and nearly one-third of a tablet held horizontally (and even more if the pages have existing banner ads across the top), may strike some publishers as obtrusive, since it will push off much of what they intended for their landing pages.
“Publishers spend a lot of time trying to get the user experience right because it takes a lot of testing and experimentation to get people to stick around on a website, and having someone else change all of that for the user is tough,” Mr. Morrissey said. He added that publishers were unlikely to complain about this being done for a popular charity like the Red Cross, but would raise a fuss if Bitly tried to execute a similar program on behalf of brands.
Bitly wrote in a response that “while we can’t say whether or not we’ll do this with another partner” in the future, “we certainly would be selective.”
In November, along with making a $25 million donation to fight Ebola, Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg added a “Donate” button to the top of newsfeeds for users of the social network, and posted a video to Facebook about doing so.
An online video introduces Hope.ly, and it will be promoted on the Bitly landing page and on the Red Cross’s social channels, but BBDO, the ad agency that came up with the idea is not, ironically, making any ads for it.
Mr. Markham of BBDO said that while the execution is not the sort of thing clients request in assignments known as creative briefs, it does exemplify one way that agencies should advocate for charities and brands.
“It’s very hard to brief for an idea like this,” said Mr. Markham of the Hope.ly effort. “The agency has to kind of love you as a client and spend time thinking of you outside of the normal briefs and come up with this sort of stuff.”