What I learned during the Ice Bucket Challenge: be ready for anything

I remember when the Ice Bucket Challenge began to impact the ALS community. It was early August 2014. We received word from our Massachusetts branch that the challenge was really taking off in New England, particularly in the Boston area. The branch told us how former Boston College baseball player Pete Frates, who was diagnosed with ALS in 2012, inspired his old team-mates and other Bostonians to take the challenge.

At this point, I thought the impact would only be on a regional scale, particularly in the north-east, since Frates and two others who prompted the challenge to go viral, Pat Quinn and Anthony Senerchia, lived in Boston and New York.

No one could have expected the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge would become one of the most successful and talked-about viral events in the history of social media.

I knew it was larger-than-life when I saw both Microsoft founder and philanthropist Bill Gates and the Tonight Show host, Jimmy Fallon, take the challenge and post their videos online.

The Ice Bucket Challenge was hugely inspiring, but it also taught me a valuable lesson about the importance of planning ahead.

Throughout most of August and September, my colleagues at the ALS Association worked an average of 12 hours a day, including weekends. In communications and marketing, we fielded enquiries about the challenge’s impact on the fight against ALS and our organisation’s role in it.

The media relations team receives around 10 enquiries on a typical day. During the height of the challenge, we received about 200. Emails and social media messages arrived from national and global news outlets, students and ordinary people interested in how the ALS Association intended to spend the funds we received from the challenge. This required me to work with my colleagues in communications and marketing and other departments to formulate consistent messaging that answered these questions in a timely manner.

This collaborative approach helped communications and marketing to create a page discussing the Ice Bucket Challenge and its impact on the Association and a Frequently Asked Questions section on our website. We regularly updated these pages as we received additional information or questions pertaining to the challenge and The ALS Association.

One issue that people frequently asked related to the use of water in drought-stricken areas. For this, we suggested people either repurpose the water or make a donation to an ALS charity of their choice. The FAQ page also discusses how we allocate funds for research, care services for people with ALS, and public policy endeavours, which benefit families living with this disease. As such, we were sharing our mission priorities with many who had never heard about ALS or the ALS Association before the challenge started.

I am amazed that millions of people around the globe willingly poured buckets of ice-cold water on themselves to spread awareness of this cruel disease. According to Google, more people searched for ALS in August 2014 than during the entire last decade. This grassroots movement showed me how people can harness the power of social media for good andreinforced in me the need to be prepared for any situation.