On Feb 13, rapper Kanye West announced on Twitter that he was 53 million dollars in debt and pleaded for help from billionaires and fans alike as if he was a charity. Twitter was ablaze with people ridiculing this situation, but what disturbed us was the many fans that defended him - even after he said he is a more worthy charity than building a school in Africa. Some fans even put up a Go Fund Me page and were raising money for him as pointed out on the Stephen Colbert Show on Feb 17. The next day we responded with HelpKenyaNotKanye.com.

As soon as we saw the Kanye segment on Feb 17, we were inspired to create a website overnight. We started researching the cost of Kanye's merchandise as well as found 10 reputable Kenyan charities to list on the site as calls to action for visitors. In less than 24 hours, the site was designed and live. The strategy was simple. Respond quickly to the Kanye drama while it was relevant and divert the attention to those who really need it. We immediately started infiltrating the social chatter surrounding Kanye West and gaining traction amongst his followers and global news media.

The reach grew exponentially with every day the site was live. We reached over 10,000 individual tweeters with some major influencers resulting in over 15 million in impressions just from social media. Once the news media picked it up, we were covered by over 100 different sources from around the globe garnering another 20 million in earned media impressions. We received +5 million in site visits. One charity received so much traffic that their server crashed. The hashtag #HelpKenyaNotKanye was trending to the point that POTUS himself was following us on Twitter and Kenyan charities that weren't listed on the site started using the hashtag to join the movement and gain traction for their charities. Most importantly we raised actual money for Kenya. The site collected over $10K in less than a month - which, according to Kenya aid, is enough money to build an school for children in Kenya.