BT, It’s Been Real

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Whether we want to believe it or not, the summer is almost over. Today is the last day in the office for us interns here at BT’s National Headquarters, so we wanted to leave you all with a little parting gift; a farewell blog to reflect on some of the projects we’ve embarked on this summer and how you, the BT community, have helped our cause grow in just a few short months.

Our first real interaction with the worldwide BT community was through a Facebook Profile Picture campaign. One of our goals this summer was to stay in touch with you and keep you engaged with the cause even though school is out. We want to enable you to keep working towards the goal of Universal Primary Education because, after all, a child in Uganda never pauses in the pursuit of their dreams. So we invited all of you to share your passion with your friends by changing your profile pictures to our logo. We were looking to paint Facebook orange, but as new interns hosting our first online event had no idea what the reaction would be. So we couldn’t believe it when 172 of you displayed your support for all to see! Such a simple action really got people talking about Building Tomorrow, and even better – asking how they could join us. The evidence of the collective passion of our BTers truly inspired us to believe that the sky is the limit, and we haven’t looked back since.

IMG_0976From that point on things began moving very quickly, and the rest of the summer has honestly flown by. We made a rap video, shamelessly promoting Building Tomorrow and grooving to the beat of “Shoop” by Salt-N-Pepa, emulating the moves of the great Ellen Degeneres to bring her attention to the cause. We’ve shared it a lot this summer, but if you haven’t seen the video – here it is.

To make sure that everyone in the Twitter-verse heard about our summer’s work, we held a tweet-a-thon, cleverly named the #BTweetathon. This was an incredible event, and we cannot thank all of you who participated enough. For twelve hours, on August 2, the BT community tweeted @TheEllenShow about the BT rap and the need for education in Uganda. We generated a lot of buzz and most importantly were able to show the true colors of BT. We reinforced to our supporters the idea that we’re a young organization and as such, one that is willing to do whatever it takes to achieve our goals. We’re not simply asking for donations, but instead for supporters to volunteer their time, talent and resources – whether they be rapping or dancing or designing a school – to help their peers around the world.

Sometimes people write social media off far too quickly. And before this summer, we might’ve taken it lightly ourselves. People may ask what one tweet or one ‘like’ can do. Well, we’ve discovered that the answer is: a lot. Just one example of that is a website called JustCoz. We’ve started using this website, which allows BTers to donate one tweet to Building Tomorrow each day – which means that they permit us to send a tweet through their account about our cause, fundraisers and events. So far, 15 people have signed up, which might not sound like an impressive number, but these 15 people have a combined reach of 4,739 followers. That makes 4,739 people who might never have heard of or gotten involved with Building Tomorrow had it not been for that one tweet.

We know that as summer ends, your schedules will only get busier, but we hope that you’ll keep up the incredible engagement that we’ve seen this summer. We want to thank you one last time for showing us how powerful the BT community is and how much difference we can all make together.

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