Earlier this year, the World Wildlife Fund faced a strange promotional paradox: On March 25th from 8:30 to 9:30 p.m. Eastern time, the group honored Earth Hour Day, a campaign asking people and companies around the world turn off their lights at the same time in support of actions against climate change.

Behind the scenes, making it all possible was a user-generated content platform from Stackla, which made its name doing similar grassroots and viral campaigns for commercial companies like Disney, Virgin Holidays, Ford, and Absolut Vodka.

In recent years, however, the company has found that more nonprofits are seeking it out.

After all, making hashtags go viral isn’t an accident–it’s a science (or so the company claims), something that if planned right can generate serious revenue and support, something charitable organizations are always fighting to attract.

To make it all work, Stackla uses custom aggregating technology–basically its own web-crawling search engine that scours Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube for a collection of hashtags or keywords. It can also search through content put up by specific users or by some specific geography. “If there is a particular area where there may be a protest or some sort of activist movement, we can collect content [sent out] from that specific area,” says CEO and cofounder Damien Mahoney.

What’s collected is then run through an in-house curating program, which uses its own algorithms to weigh the relevance of the content to recommend publishable options to a campaign moderator.

Overall, more than 30 nonprofits, including Greenpeace, No Kid Hungry, and the ACLU have worked with Stackla since it launched in 2012, which the company accommodated in an ad hoc way by offering various kinds of discounts based on the size and scope of the work. In August, Mahoney decided to formalize (and advertise) Stackla’s ability to create viral social good, by announcing a new division, Stackla for Good.

Read the source article at fastcompany.com