Enviromental Campaign

For this weeks environmental campaign blog post I checked out the Surfrider Foundation. The Surfrider Foundation's "core activities and campaigns are used to protect our oceans, waves, and beaches." They are able to accomplish this task by placing each environmental issue that they strive to fix into categories such as: Clean Water, Beach Access, Beach Preservation, and Protecting Special Places. The Surfrider Foundation has had 305 victories since 1/1/2006. One of those victories was the Oahu Smoking Ban which is part of the beach preservation category. The Surfrider Foundation's goal for this particular campaign was to ban smoking on Oahu's South Shore beaches and parks. This bill was unanimously passes and are now pushing for an island-wide ban. Amazingly, Oahu "will become the second county in Hawaii to ban smoking in all of its public parks and beaches." The Oahu smoking ban was successful due to the Hold Onto Your Butt's campaign "which offers an onramp to help people to understand some of the above-mentioned issues and why why they should not litter." The Hold Onto Your Butt's campaign gained awareness with the public through social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and Flickr. From what I gathered, the Surfrider Foundation really utilized Twitter , Facebook, and Youtube as their main sources of reaching out to raise awareness. The Surfrider Foundation's Twitter exploited specific hashtags, Twitter handles, lists, tweets, staff members, stats, piggybacking tactics, and much more.  Their Facebook page "reflected their brand" by "creating a landing page for fans/non fans, creating a cause, allowing Facebook friends to post [on their page], integrated channels, events, Facebook questions, video uploads, discussions, and contests." Through Facebook the Surfrider foundation was able to gain insights about thoughts, opinions, demographics, and any other question, thought, issue that followers had. As far as their Youtube goes, they decided to make a funny or compelling video instead of a sad one, build stewardship with video, hold contests, and encourage supporters to upload their own videos. The campaign tactics that the Surfrider Foundation has in place are efficient and effective as (like I said before) they have had 305 victories and those numbers are still growing. Personally, I really like the way they campaign on Youtube. I think it's really effective to have funny videos rather than talking about how terrible we are with the way we treat our planet. I also like how they have people upload their own video showing what their fans are doing to save the planet. I also think its effective to hold contests because it gets their fans involved and excited to be apart of the Surfrider Foundation team.