By Cody Swit­zer

Sec­ond Har­vest Food Bank of San­ta Cla­ra and San Ma­teo Counties

Twit­ter han­dle: @2ndharvest

What it raised: $15,000

The cam­paign: The food bank want­ed to in­spire its fol­low­ers on so­cial net­works to post com­ments on its Facebook threads, re­spond to its Twit­ter posts, and sub­mit photos to its Flickr page. To do that, it worked with Charles Good­win, the lo­cal own­er of a chain of Mas­sage Envy fran­chise stores, to de­vel­op a fund-rais­ing cam­paign that pro­vid­ed mon­ey for the char­i­ty each time a fol­low­er took an ac­tion on one of the or­gan­i­za­tion’s so­cial net­works.

What it used: Facebook, Twit­ter, and Flickr

How it worked: Mr. Good­win do­nat­ed $5 ev­ery time a new per­son de­cid­ed to “like” the food bank on Facebook and ev­ery time a per­son post­ed a photo sup­port­ing the food bank on Facebook, Twit­ter, or Flickr. His com­pa­ny also a­greed to con­trib­ute $2 for ev­ery com­ment or “like” on food-bank Facebook posts as well as $5 for ev­ery Twit­ter fol­low­er and an­oth­er $2 ev­ery time the char­i­ty was mentioned or its posts re­tweeted on Twit­ter. The cam­paign was pro­mot­ed in Mas­sage Envy’s stores and at the food bank. The food bank also cre­at­ed an e-mail mes­sage that its em­ploy­ees could send to friends to en­cour­age them to take part in the cam­paign.

What it ac­com­plished: The monthlong cam­paign met the $15,000 goal Mr. Good­win set. Along the way, near­ly 890 new peo­ple de­cid­ed to “like” its Facebook page, and the num­ber of com­ments and “likes” rose by 391 per­cent. The char­i­ty also gained 153 new Twit­ter fol­low­ers.

Why it worked: The char­i­ty learned that the do­na­tion in­cen­tive alone wasn’t enough. Of­fi­cials said the char­i­ty need­ed to make sure it was provid­ing reg­u­lar, use­ful con­tent that in­vit­ed sup­port­ers to re­act to a ques­tion or re­spond to a chal­lenge. “You real­ly need to fan the flames on this one,” says Mi­chelle Berg, com­mu­ni­ty re­la­tions and events co­or­di­na­tor at the food bank.

For the Mas­sage Envy ef­fort, the char­i­ty sched­uled themed days through­out the pro­mo­tion to fo­cus its mes­sages on cer­tain pro­grams or needs.