Case-Study: Pinterest Charity Followers Grow 5x in 6 Weeks

Want to Become a Popular Pinterest Charity? Take a Page out of the Book from the Central Oklahoma Humane Society.

The team at the Central Oklahoma Humane Society does amazing work everyday. Since their beginning in 2007, they have found homes for nearly 9,000 cats and dogs and spayed and neutered 36,000 pets. In August of 2012, however, they wanted to have new ways of reaching their supporters and promoting the well-being of animals. With Pets being one of the most popular categories on Pinterest, the platform seemed an essential part of the organization’s social media plan. When they asked PinLeague to help craft their strategy and grow their Pinterest followers, it was a no-brainer that we said “Yes!”

Funny Picture of Dogs Shaking — Who could resist that face?

Getting Starting on Pinterest is HARD.

Despite being well-known and well-respected organization with great success in one of Pinterest’s most active user states, OK Humane was having a hard time connecting with their target audience on Pinterest. Close to six months after their first pin, https://pinterest.com/okhumane sat at only ~70 followers. To get them over the new account blues, we suggested turning on Tailwind’s Audience Engine to engage animal lovers across Pinterest.

Local Targeting on Pinterest is Even Harder.

For OKHumane, though, there was an added wrinkle: they are predominantly looking to connect with members of their local community who may support the organization’s mission as volunteers, donors or future parents for their wonderfully lovable dogs and cats. Without structured location data on Pinterest, it was difficult to find and engage members in Oklahoma. Luckily, PinLeague enables local targeting on Pinterest by adding structure to otherwise unstructured Pinterest user location data. Local targeting is extremely valuable to any organization or company that does business locally, including major national brands with many local branches. In fact, studies suggest 1 local social follower may be as engaged as 40 Corporate account followers!

Local Targeting + Audience Development Worked.

The results of adding Local Targeting to the Audience Engine have been impressive for the Central Oklahoma Humane Society. Just 6 weeks in to their use of PinLeague, Pinterest followers had grown from less than 80 to nearly 500. This makes them one of the fastest growing new Pinterest charity accounts we’ve seen!

In addition, PinLeague shared some insights and Pinterest best practices that helped the team at OK Humane adjust their Pinterest content strategy. As a result of their efforts, OK Humane now has an average of >2 repins per pin, where their previous average was 0.2!!

Check out the results for yourself, with these screenshots taken from the PinLeague’s Pinterest Analytics tool.