Birthright’s new marketing strategy

Its about your story, Birthright Trip

Birthright just announced a major new marketing campaign. Guess what the theme is?

Storytelling. 

Taglit-Birthright has recently launched a new campaign called, “400,000 Birthright Stories- What’s Yours?” that began today when their 400,000^th participant arrived in Israel. This campaign allows their global network of participants to share their stories on the Birthright website, social media accounts by using the appropriate hashtag, or at “story-booths” located at Birthright events. These stories are then posted to a centralized site- birthrightisrael.org/stories- which Birthright then promotes through their social media portals.

It is exciting to see an organization as impactful as Birthright adopt this strategy, which reflects a forward-thinking mindset towards social media marketing. It is fascinating to compare the details of this strategy with Birthright’s previous campaign, “Hello Israel.” In this campaign, Birthright adopted the tone of “look how much fun you can have by participating on a Birthright trip.” This approach is very common and is usually expressed on Facebook in the form of “like this post if you think we provide an awesome experience.”

However, all you get from this campaign is a “like,” forcing you to be more formal and passive and leaving the audience with the feeling that an organization or program is talking down to its future participants.

Birthright’s new campaign is completely different. By helping their own participants share their personal stories they encourage a peer-to-peer method of spreading a message, resulting in a more personal and engaging message. This also creates a more trusted message because a prospective participant is reading a story written by their friend about their own personal experience, which is a far more effective and convincing method for marketing your experience.

A link to the chain

 This is by far the largest storytelling campaign that we’ve seen from an Israel program, but it’s not the first campaign of its kind to be launched. Onward Israel’s internship program has been working with us for two years to help them expand their reach through storytelling.

Similarly, at BOMAH we recently ran a “Jerusalem Ambassadors” program  as apart of an effort to connect people to Jerusalem and bring more international students to the city. These “Jerusalem Ambassadors,” a group of international students studying at the Rothberg International School at Hebrew University, were taught key principles and strategies and were empowered to share Jerusalem’s story.

Finally, for over a year, we’ve been teaching storytelling strategies at Bar Ilan University’s public diplomacy school to educate future change-makers about the effective use of social media to create social and political impact.

Coming full circle

Being Part of the story

 

I believe that this storytelling strategy is one of the best ways to spread your message, expand your brand, and influence people. Groups and individuals who have adopted this approach have seen dramatic results in terms of both building their base of followers and reaching new people.

Visit our site- bomah.org– to learn how you can bring the BOMAH strategy to your company or organization.