Industry
Voluntary, Community and Charity Sector
The Client
The Wheel represents the interests of this sector as a whole to government and the general public.
The Challenge
The Wheel wanted to find a way to enrich their "Better Together" Campaign, by offering a more interactive and exciting mapping experience to people who wanted to take part in their video competition online.
Solution
The Better Together Campaign online map was enhanced through the use and application of Geographic Information.
Benefits
The Wheel is certain that GIS played a key role in heightening awareness of local groups this year. The inclusion of tweets on the interactive map helped to raise the profile of the campaign and keep conversations flowing.
Summary
In 2010, The Wheel launched a nationwide campaign to draw the public’s attention to the work of voluntary and charitable groups and encourage more people to engage with these good causes. Called ‘Better Together’, the initiative centred on a web site (www.bettertogether.ie) where charities, clubs and associations could showcase their work through short inspirational videos.
The original Better Together web site had featured a Google map, displaying the locations of some of the groups that had submitted videos. However, this map offered very basic functionality and The Wheel wanted to find a way to enrich this part of the next campaign. “We found that the map was one of the most popular parts of the web site, but it was very limited,” says Gert Ackermann, communications officer at The Wheel. “As a key part of the 2011 campaign, we wanted to offer a far more interactive and exciting mapping experience. Like many web sites, our Better Together site has a lot of content on it and we wanted to make it easier for users to filter the content down by location and find out about groups in their own communities.”
In what was a new and exciting development for The Wheel, Esri Ireland also made it possible for the organisation to display geo-enabled ‘tweets’ from users of the Twitter social network. Through the interactive map, users can therefore not only easily find the good causes nearest to where they live, but also read what other people say about them and add their own comments. All of the videos and tweets are displayed in pop-ups from the mapping interface and users can vote for their favourite good cause, elect a local charity hero or make a donation – simply by clicking on icons within the pop-ups.
Better Together 2011 was a terrific success, surpassing even the highest expectations of The Wheel. 189 groups and charities submitted videos to the Better Together web site, and 38 inspiring individuals were nominated as potential Charity Heroes. During the course of the three-week campaign, there were over 120,000 unique visitors to the Better Together web site, three times more than in the previous year. These visitors accounted for 4.9 million page hits, indicating that visitors stayed on the site for a long site. Incredibly, the 2011 campaign attracted 231% more votes than in the same period in 2010 and raised a staggering €34,182.00 for Irish good causes.