EPA just announced the winners of a water quality video contest that we ran in April leading up to Earth Day.
For this contest, EPA offered two cash awards of $2500 to the two best video entries. We were astounded by how many entries we received: more than 250 videos were submitted by the close of the contest.
Obviously, there are many social marketing benefits to this effort. In many of the video submissions for example, elementary and high school aged students researched water quality facts from our Website (http://epa.gov/owow/), and then figured out crafty ways to impart the message to people as a PSA.
As the entries were pouring in near Earth Day, I stayed up past midnight glued to my computer, watching more and more videos and laughing out loud. I haven’t watched all the of submissions, but here is a sample of some entries that I enjoyed watching.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAzh7t1bDYE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_R5gE5xMwTI
They’ve been viewed 28K times in total so far, and we estimate that over 1000 citizens got involved in making the videos for the contest. This was an exceptional set of results for minimal investment.
Here are the contest winners: http://www.epa.gov/owow/videocontest.html
Blog entry: http://blog.epa.gov/blog/
Press Release: http://yosemite.epa.gov/opa/admpress.nsf/0/6FB9703C35184FC9852575E50062D3E9
This is terrific. Am looking forward to viewing.
I like this.
Amazing. A win/win for the citizen, the community, and EPA. I’ve seen EPA hold two of the video contests now. Will be interesting to see how other agencies leverage this best practice.
Thanks for sharing this Kol. We’re hoping to launch a recycling video competition &
this is very helpful.