Make-A-Wish: Share Your Ears

Make-A-Wish: Share Your Ears

A campaign that made fundraising fun.

The Challenge

For more than 35 years, Disney and Make-a-Wish have partnered to create custom adventures for ill children. A fresh campaign, “Share Your Ears,” aimed to raise up to $1 million by encouraging users to put on Mickey Mouse ears (or a DIY creation), snap a photo, and share it on social media. Disney donated $5 for each share, so it was imperative that the campaign be fun and easy to participate in. Fundraising stats and stories needed to be prominent on the page, and it all had to be turned around before an ABC promotion by Neil Patrick Harris.

The Solution

We built a cheerful, kid-friendly, and responsive site that made it a cinch for users to snap and share photos to their own networks, and introduced them to the kids they’d be helping out. Third-party social integration with TINT automatically pulled in participant photos and details, easily curatable by the client and constantly refreshed. A thank-you page gave users further enticements to engage with the campaign. It was also key for the site to be able to absorb the traffic that would result from the ABC promotion, so we built the back end to handle as many as 40,000 concurrent users.

The Result

The foundation reached its fundraising goal almost immediately after launch, and the donations kept coming. When the ABC promotion aired, the site was easily able to handle the flood of visitors. The solid, appealing infrastructure is in place for use in the next campaign.

The success of the original site led to an updated campaign for the 2017 holiday season. Disney was so excited by the results of the new site and campaign they decided to double the donation from $1 million to $2 million. 

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