Davey O'Brien Foundation Case Study

Davey O’Brien Foundation

Challenge
The Davey O’Brien Foundation is a foundation that has a yearly award that is given to the nation’s number one college football quarterback as voted upon by fans and a selection committee. Although the award was first awarded in 1977 there was still a very large population of people that had never heard of the award.

Atomic researched the social marketing landscape and found that there were little to no discussions about the award occurring online while The Heisman Award was getting plenty of discussion even during off season.

We were challenged to not only increase brand awareness but to also turn that awareness into traffic to the site and to register new fans for the voting process.

Implementation
Atomic leveraged the massive use of Twitter and Facebook primarily to accomplish our goals of increasing traffic and brand awareness.

Facebook
We developed a Facebook application widget that would allow friends to add the current fan vote standings, next game, and ability to challenge their friends to vote and spread the word. We also created a fan page and began the process of encouraging people to become a fan of the page. We shared updates on the vote, marquee quarterback matchups, and other O’Brien news on the Facebook wall. Fans were also encouraged to share their opinions.

Twitter
We setup a twitter account for the foundation and linked the updates from Twitter to automatically update the Facebook fan page as well. Fans were encouraged to share the rankings of their favorite quarterback through Twitter along with special hash tags focused on our markets.

Results
Prior to August the foundation had 0 fans on Facebook and there were 0 discussions on Twitter discussing the award. As of the end of September (1 month after we finished implementing our techniques for Social Marketing) they had over 3,000 fans on Facebook! On average the largest amount of time, at any point of the day, between discussions about the Award or Vote on Twitter is 1 hour.  

The end result was an over 800% increase in traffic and registrations on the site as well as an incredible amount of brand awareness that was brought to the foundation through Twitter and Facebook!