Read our full, final Betty White Challenge report here [February 2023].
TL;DR: Since January, we’ve donated $7,805 to animal shelters, sanctuaries and organizations, and we will be donating thousands more by the end of the year. All thanks to an internet challenge, a viral post, and the help of our social media followers. Scroll to the bottom to see the details of how much we donated to which organizations.
The challenge that went viral
January 12, 2022, we uploaded a post to our Facebook and Instagram, asking our followers to tag animal sanctuaries and shelters, and in return we will donate $5 to each tagged shelter. The response was unbelievable, and it exceeded even our wildest expectations. Within a few hours, there were already hundreds of comments from people all over the world…
The response was so overwhelming that the next day, we had to make a hard decision and decided to stop collecting tags once we’ve reached the total amount of $16,000. That took only a few more hours, which meant it was time to get to work.
A pile of data to process
First, we had to compile a list of the shelters and the amount of times each of them have been tagged by unique users across Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. We wanted to be fair, so we took a “first tagged, first served” sort of approach, while comparing data from all three platforms.
We’re not going to lie, it was a challenge! But after a lot of data processing, we managed to create a list that was accurate and fair.
Next - we realized we had this amazing list of organizations from all over the world who are doing their best to help animals, so we decided we want to try and help them even more.
What else can we do?
We decided to initiate a brand new affiliate program, thinking that a single one-time donation is nice, but an affiliate program could potentially help them make some extra money in the long run.
Additionally, we created a series of illustrated educational prints about farm animals, and offered to customize them and send printable files to any animal farm or sanctuary who wanted them, free of charge, to do with as they please. The response was amazing, and our posters are already helping people learn about farm animals all over the world!
Rolling out the donations
All of the above took a while. We’re a tiny group of people, and running Simple Happy Kitchen already is a handful, so we really had to push forward through a lot of technical issues and prepare to make sure that once we start the donation process, everything will go smoothly.
Making the donations was also a long, meticulous process, because figuring out how to donate money to 143 unique places was surprisingly hard and time consuming. We did our best to make sure every tagged place will get their share.
So far, we've donated $7,805 to 143 animal shelters, farms, organizations and even some amazing private people who are just taking care of the animals in their community.
You can find the final list of sanctuaries we've donated to right here.
What’s next?
Now that we have the ball rolling, we will do our best to keep you updated with the donations made each month, until we finish rolling them out (we expect that to happen by the end of 2022).
In the meantime, if you wish to support this entire operation, you can do that by either buying anything from our online store, or simply by helping us spread the word.
Follow us on social media [Facebook, Instagram, Twitter], share our posts, and help us make a difference for animals all over the world.
We talked to the head of one of the organizations, click here to read the full interview - there are cats in it for ya!
