Giving Compass' Take:

• Stackla is a successful user-generated content platform that can help make campaigns go viral. The company started working with nonprofit organizations and can now make social good campaigns more popular. 

• How is Stackla beginning to market it's approach as a social enterprise? 

• Read about models of high-level partnerships with social enterprises. 

Last 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. When photographed from above, the effect of entire cities going dim is remarkable, but people on the ground don’t see that: They’re just sitting in darkness.

That’s not a great way to emotionally stir someone into long-term engagement, so the group’s Australia chapter tried something different. It exempted camera flashes and smartphone screens, asking people to upload photos of what they were doing when the lights went off alongside the hashtags #EarthHour, #JoinTheFuture, and #EH17.

In all, WWF-Australia aggregated 150,000 posts, boosting site traffic by 72% and adding 30% more Twitter followers. Many visitors to the website joined mailing lists for future action or donation chances.

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.

Read the full article about Stackla by Ben Paynter at Fast Company