When Social Impact Campaigns Scale Up from a Moment to a Movement

Written by Megan Lewis (Communications and Marketing Specialist) and Kristen Fenton (Partnership Operations Lead)

Annual awareness campaigns are, by nature, short-lived. A particular day, week or month creates a reason for people to pay attention to an issue and offers opportunities to get involved, whether through donating, volunteering their time, or adding their voice to a cause. But once the social impact campaign ends and public attention shifts elsewhere, a familiar question often follows: did it have a meaningful and lasting impact?

For organisations working towards long-term social change, this can create a tension. Systemic change takes years. Building awareness takes time. Relationships require time. Yet there is value in creating a moment when an issue can cut through the noise and give people a reason to act now and with others.

This is the opportunity presented by every campaign day, week or month. The challenge is ensuring that the moment is connected to something that continues to drive change long after the campaign itself has ended.

DO MORE annual campaigns sit within a broader partnerships, communications and advocacy strategy that is built around long-term, systemic change and a commitment to supporting partners to “do more" with what they have and where they are. Short-term activity isn’t the whole strategy, but it does play a particular role in creating a moment that over several years builds momentum and becomes something impactful.

In the immediate, these campaigns provide fundraising opportunities that enable us to provide resources and training to the early learning programmes (ELPs) we already partner with, as well as extend our reach to ELPs beyond our current footprint. They also give businesses, organisations and the individual practical ways to participate by donating, volunteering, or buying a campaign resource.

What we have experienced, however, is that the value goes beyond fundraising and marketing. There is an entire value chain that is built out of the campaign moment: generating attention, building understanding, creating opportunities for participation, giving and networking, establishing new relationships and maintaining existing ones. All of these create opportunities for us to widen and deepen our work towards sustained social change through meaningful partnerships.

World Food Day is an example of this. The campaign creates a national moment to talk about childhood malnutrition and hunger, sharing knowledge about why nutrition and access to healthy food is so important in the early years. In the last two years, our partnership with East Coast Radio pushed the issue to the top of the public agenda in KwaZulu-Natal.

Businesses could participate in a very tangible way by buying limited edition campaign t-shirts for their staff, creating an immediate opportunity for fundraising and awareness raising. The t-shirts were also branded with our long-standing campaign, DoMoreFridays, which encourages staff to wear their t-shirt every Friday to show their support of young children. In this way, World Food Day was the moment that catalysed more people to join a movement to improve the lives of young children in communities where DO MORE works directly and beyond.

Mandela Day works in a similar way. DO MORE uses this national day centered on volunteering 67 minutes as an opportunity to raise awareness of the role of play in young children’s learning, health and development, while also mobilising people to actively do something about it. Our Mandela Day 2025 campaign highlighted the health burden of climate change on young children, the need to support learning spaces (both indoors and outdoors) with climate resilient infrastructure as well as train practitioners to prepare children for a changing climate. The fundraising element of Mandela Day enabled us pilot key infrastructure ideas at 60 ECD centres and distribute age-appropriate climate education package for children and practitioners.

This short-term initiative is balanced with the learnings from this pilot that will feed into development of a Climate Resilience Toolkit, which is a government-endorsed plan designed to offer practical, scalable solutions that address both climate education and infrastructure adaptation.

Our BaBonise (Show Them!) fatherhood advocacy campaign demonstrates another part of this value chain. The campaign is primarily an awareness platform, creating conversations at predominantly male-attended and -spectated sporting eventssporting events about the role of men as caregivers and playmates. We extended the campaign into Bushbuckridge for the Sunbake Soccer Tournament in December 2025, bringing new business partners, sponsors and staff volunteers into the campaign. What started as an activation in Nkomazi in 2023 has created opportunities for us to build relationships, enter new spaces, and explore how the work could grow.

Partnerships are a key impact multiplier in all our campaign roll-outs. A campaign creates a platform for different organisations and individuals to come together around an issue. It gives existing partners something to work towards together, while creating an opportunity for new organisations to understand the work and get involved. A sponsor can become a longer-term partner. A volunteer can become an advocate. A person who first encounters an issue through a campaign can take that knowledge into their own home, workplace or community.

Advocacy is often understood as influencing policy, but it is also about influencing people. It is about building movements, shaping narratives, and creating the demand, agency and collective will needed for communities, institutions and public systems to respond. Every volunteer, donor, parent, business leader or practitioner who engages with a campaign becomes part of a broader ecosystem of support for young children. Choosing the message, the partners and the moment are all advocacy choices.

A campaign may only run for a few weeks each year. However the DO MORE Foundation chooses to build awareness, participation, resources and relationships that can be carried into the years ahead. As a result, the impact of that moment extends well beyond its campaign window.

Social impact campaigns are an opportunity, through partnership, to create meaningful and deep connections within communities to create long-term change.