Social Listening: Make-A-Wish foundation

     According to the Make-A-Wish foundation, every twenty minutes, a child is diagnosed with a critical illness. (wish website)I could not even begin to imagine how hard it would be for a child to miss out on so much of their childhood due to an illness. The Make-A-Wish foundation is a place kids with eligible critical illnesses can get one wish granted. These wishes range from shopping sprees to a backyard renovation. Making a wish foundation is interesting because it is fairly well known, but no one actively talks about it. When I asked most of my friends and family, they knew what it was, and the common reaction was, "it's the place that gives sick kids a wish." This is why I choose to take a look at their marketing. 

    A quick glance at the Make-A-Wish foundations social media, and you see a sizable amount of followers across all major social media platforms with roughly 300,000 followers on Twitter and Instagram, respectively. Their posts' responses seem to be generally positive, and happy to see the kids get their wishes. With the occasional person jokingly being jealous. Their mission statement is as follows "Together, we create life-changing wishes for children with critical illnesses." The Make-A-Wish foundation offers a lot of value and has a huge advantage over its small amount of competitors. The make a wish foundation promises to grant kids wishes in these situations and do it with a bit of transparency. Looking at their website, you can easily find a link to how they spend their funds, along with downloadable copies of their financial statements. When looking for examples of things people are saying about Make-A-Wish foundation, I could only find good things. After looking all over youtube, google news, or social media it is hard to find a post with anything bad being said about making a wish. However, you can find some videos of people apologizing for being a bad wish or make-wish kids talking about their bad experiences with a celebrity that was their wish. However, the reliability of the sources that these complaints come from is very low, so I will not be sowing them. I will be showing some of the company's social media comments.

    The first photo was relating to a post Make-A-Wish made talking about their partnership with Subaru, and you can see that some people go as far as to say they would even buy a Subaru because of the donation Make-A-Wish. The other comments seem to be people just happy to see a kid getting their wish. 

    I think aspects of marketing that the make a wish foundation is using is storytelling. The Make a wish foundation uses tear-jerking stories of kids to get people to donate. This, I believe, is more effective than its competitors. When you go to the store, and the cashier asks you if you want to donate to so and so foundation, you are less likely to donate than if you don't know anything about who or what your money is going towards. This is where the make a wish foundation has the advantage. These stories make people think of kids in their life who could possibly be in those situations and backgrounds that relate. Not only this, but everyone loves seeing a kid smile. If you show people how these kids that go through so much can have something to smile about, I feel like that is why people donate. They are donating because they are buying the why. Not just donating for the sake of donating. They are also remarkable. If you google the Make-A-Wish foundation, you see story after story of sick kids getting one thing they really wanted. No one does this on the scale that the Make-A-Wish foundation does.

Another thing I noticed is that the Make-A-Wish foundation rarely responds to anything. They continue on making kid's dreams come true. The company rarely receives any backlash and, as a result, has even less to respond to. The low amount of controversy surrounding the Make-A-Wish foundation allows them to really focus on making kid's dreams come true. They also continue working with very likable celebrities such as Gordon Ramsay to do challenges such as 24 wishes in 24 hours. Personally, I love anything Gordon Ramsay does, so to me, this is genius. Being such a big non-profit, it can be hard for the make a wish foundation to respond to comments on their social media. However, if I were to be a brand manager, I would try and gain more social media engagement to their post. They could respond to comments under their post giving an update on a child or maybe creating some sort of interactive fundraiser to get people to make as many wishes come true. Despite their sizable social media following, they have little engagement, and getting more engagement, I believe, should be the top priority in terms of marketing.

While researching this post, I realized that to be remarkable, you don't always have a product. You can simply be the company that grants wishes to sick kids. After all, who doesn't love it when people who have it rough can have something to smile about.