The Challenge

• Western Union is extremely active in various immigrant communities in the United States and plays a large role in helping these communities transfer money to family in their country of origin. The Nigerian community in the US is one of these communities. Western Union wanted to sponsor a national contest to celebrate traditional Nigerian outfits and came to Marden-Kane to plan and execute the contest. The idea was to have a contest at events in U.S. cities celebrating Nigerian Independence Day. The problem was that if they required people to attend the events to enter they would not be reaching everyone in their market and they wanted to be more inclusive.

The Solution

• While the contest was promoted heavily at the Nigerian Independence Day events where Western Union was a sponsor, Marden-Kane set up the contest on Facebook where people could upload photos without having to attend the events.
• A Facebook Share message and a custom Tell-A-Friend email were built and utilized for people within the Nigerian community to tell each other about the contest, especially those not able to attend an event.
• The contest was set up with five weekly submission periods, followed by Finalist selection and a week-long voting period for each submission period. Each weekly winner then won a Grand Prize based on votes.
• Users were provided a discount coupon for a Western Union transaction as an incentive to vote.
• Weekly winners were showcased on the Winners Page
• Additional Share features were put into place to allow weekly finalists to share the news with their friends and ask for people to vote for them.

The Results

• The promotion was extremely popular within the Nigerian community and was repeated a second year.
• Users returned on the site each week to see if they were Finalists and vote on weekly winners, creating an engaged audience.
• The average Entrant shared about the Contest 5 times and the traffic to the site grew over 500% from year one to year two.
• Western Union was thrilled to make a positive impact within the community.