One Day Without Shoes

By: Indira Abidin

Blake Mycoskie, a young entrepreneur, established his company, TOMS Shoes, based on the fact that millions of children still live without shoes. These children can’t properly attend school, prone to infection and missed many opportunities to grow and fulfill their potentials. TOMS Shoes give a pair of new shoes to a shoeless kid for every product sold, One For OneTM. In 2007 TOMS Shoes launched an annual One Day Without Shoes (OWDS) campaign, asking people to go barefoot for a day or even an hour to understand how it’s like to have no shoe.

In spring 2011, OWDS campaign went global targeting men and women aged 18-32 and moms. They generated awareness through mass media, social media and grassroots engagement.

Approaching D-Day, a series of activities were conducted. National media were engaged with creative ideas, media alerts were distributed, press releases, facebook posts, tweets were prepared for the four-week pre-event buzzing. A downloadable toolkit to inspire public to create their own ODWS event were also provided. Companies were invited for corporate challenges, and their participation was publicized.

Blake Mycoskie were interviewed by local TV stations, radio and online outlets through a satellite media tour, bloggers were invited to participate in blog buzzing, and online+print stories with pre-event call to action calendar listing were secured and local spokespeople were identified.

The result was astounding.

One million people worldwide participated in the One Day Without Shoes campaign in 2011, thanks to successful pre-event campaign. TOMS.com traffic increased by 300% on that day. Blake Mycoskie was named “Person of the Week” by ABC World News, and 490 earned million media impression was successfully created, including coverage in USAToday.com, Fast Company, AOL, MSN homepage, Yahoo! News and Time.com. “TODAY” show was kicked-off by the TV host Kathie Lee and Hoda kicking off their shoes and discussing about ODWS/TOMS. TOMS shoes were visible on their table. In major market the campaign was exposed through major media including KTLA-LA Morning News, New York City’s top local TV, WPIX-TV, NY Daily News, and dozens of blog posts including LATimesBlogs.LATimes.com and NYMetro.com. Top mom media outlets, including parents.com, GoodyBlog, LA Parent Magazine and Shape.com, also talked about the campaign and the cause. In total there were 718 stories mentioned the campaign.

Thousands of TOMS fans, friends and followers “liked” and commented on ODWS posts in facebook. ODWS became #4 most searched term on Google and AOL’s “Hot Search” on the D-Day. 1,400 companies and over 500 schools got involved to support the cause.

The success of this campaign reflects the great brand idea and campaign idea combined with great outreach implementation. The message conveyed was very relevant and successfully touched the heart of the target audience, moved them to actually participate in the event to support the cause. The campaign successfully built awareness about the “shoes crisis” around the world and of course TOMS’ corporate reputation.

So, what cause are you or your company supporting? Let’s do a campaign to build wider awareness and at the end… build your reputation. Prodev by Fortune PR is helping to support the achievement of MDG goals through corporate CSR campaigns or cause-related marketing. Many people still need our help. Let’s be there for them, contact us at nbd@fortunepr.com

Source: PRSA

Pictures source:

http://shopwithmeaning.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/Blake-Mycoskie-TOMS-Shoes-28jan2010-web.jpg