Auto-sharing takes Historic Tax Credits Campaign Viral

 Historic Tax Credits have been transformative for North Carolina.

Historic Tax Credits have been transformative for North Carolina.

In a partnership with the NC Metropolitan Mayors Association, Cityzen has launched a homepage for the campaign to restore historic preservation tax credits in North Carolina. The credits expired in 2014 when they were not renewed by the state’s legislature.

With a series of events and press releases, the campaign was announced in January, and a coalition of nonprofit organizations put together by the Secretary of the Department of Cultural Resources and the Metropolitan Mayors Association. Supporters were asked to visit HistoricTaxCredits.org, where they could sign the petition to restore the credits.

The Approach

Cityzen applied automated social sharing tools into an embedded petition on the site, so anyone who signed the petition was prompted to share it to Facebook and Twitter (see screenshot).

By the numbers, here’s what happened next:

1,539 Twitter Shares

3,205 Facebook Shares

6,614 Facebook Likes

Two keys to success

The reason this happened was two-fold. First the Metro Mayors organization built a coalition of vocal supporters and generated buzz. Secondly, they leveraged the power of pre-loaded social sharing prompts that open automatically for all participants.

Why you need auto-sharing

Many CMS platforms have adopted the pre-loaded sharing tools, but a key component that needs to be a part of your social strategy is opening the sharing windows for your user. In doing so, you provide a gentle nudge and social cues to help the user see sharing as the default behavior. It’s still easy to opt out, but we see sharing rates increase by as much as 800–1000% over baseline when this approach is used.

When this simple change happens, campaign momentum can quickly become self-sustaining and feed in on itself. The end result is reaching a much larger audience and a more powerful social impact on the same marketing budget.

It’s because of this we build auto-sharing into all our polls.

How can we help?

We’re happy to check out what you’re working on, share ideas, and help however we can. Setup a time to talk today using our demo form here:

http://cityzen.io