Canadians Are No Strangers to the Ice

The ice bucket challenge, I mean. During the dog days of summer, a number of big personalities--including politicians and celebrities--took to pouring buckets of ice cold water over themselves. Justin Trudeau did it. Even Justin Bieber was doused - twice! You've likely taken the challenge yourself. And no doubt, you've seen your social media feeds awash with videos of your friends soaking themselves and shrieking in shock. As one of the most viral philanthropic marketing campaigns we've seen reaches a tipping point, we asked Canadians about their awareness, attitudes and action toward the challenge.

If you need a refresher (pun intended), here's how it works: people get doused with buckets of ice water on video, post that video to social media, then nominate others to do the same within 24 hours, all in an effort to raise ALS awareness. People can either accept the challenge or make a donation to an ALS Charity of their choice, or do both. It's as simple as that.

We recently conducted a study at Ipsos Public Affairs that examined the success of the challenge. In addition to raising awareness for the disease, the campaign brought in a staggering $14 million in Canada (that's three times more in one month than it raises in a year!). But we wanted to go further, and understand the success of the challenge from the standpoint of the Canadian public. Overall, our data suggest that this success hinged on the ability of the initiative to speak to the three key pillars of behaviour in the context of social and political issues.

Capability: the individual's psychological and physical capacity to engage in the activity concerned.

Opportunity: the factors that lie outside the individual that makes the behaviour possible or prompt it, such as social norms, culture, and physical environment.

Motivation: the brain processes, reflective and automatic, that energize and direct behaviour.

Mixed feelings

So what do Canadians think about the challenge? Is it as much a case of vanity as it is charity? Not entirely. The results found that most have warmed up to the campaign: 48% indicate that it was an example of people sincerely wanting to help find a cure for ALS. But there are still naysayers as 31% feel that the challenge was for show-offs who didn't really care about the cause.

Knowledge of ALS

We also asked who had the most knowledge of ALS, and the results point to Canadians over 55 years or under 34 years, university graduates, and those on social media almost every day. It's also interesting to note that knowledge levels were similar regardless of where people heard about the challenge (46% for traditional media, and 48% for social media).

Traditional or social?

These days it seems as though social media is constantly edging out traditional media. But interestingly enough, despite the challenge dominating YouTube for many months, more people heard about it through traditional media (55%) than through social media (49%). As may be expected, younger Canadians were more likely to hear about the challenge through social media, while older Canadians were through traditional media. Two thirds (67%) of those over 55 years of age heard about it through traditional platforms, compared to 44% of 18-34 year olds. And while 63% of 18-34 year olds heard about it through social media, only 42% of those over 55 years have.

Millennial enthusiasm

The data reveal that younger Canadians were much more likely to act as a result of the challenge, despite the fact that older Canadians were more likely to know someone with ALS. On an overall basis, 11% looked up more information as a result of the challenge and 9% donated money to ALS as a result. But when we break this down further by age, we see that 25% of those between the ages of 18-34 years looked up information, and 15% donated money as a result of the challenge. In contrast, 3% of those over 55 years of age looked up information and only 5% donated money.

Attitudes vs. action

Attitudes toward the challenge were the same whether the respondent was active or not in social media (by that I mean authors, commentators and sharers), but those who were active are much more likely to have acted. Although very small, 3% of respondents who are active in social media indicate that they offered to volunteer time to the ALS Association, compared 0% of passive and inactive respondents. Similarly, 19% of active respondents looked for more information on ALS, compared to 10% of passive respondents and 3% of inactive respondents.

What we've learned

The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge showed just how important it is to reach the many Canadians who are currently online and engaged in social issues. Those actively engaged and those not engaged held similar attitudes toward the challenge, but engaged Canadians were much more likely to have taken action such as looking for more information about ALS, donating money or volunteering their time to ALS Canada.

While we know people are more likely to engage with and donate to causes that have touched their lives, the challenge was able to tap into a much broader base because it gave people an easy way to participate--a bucket of cold ice water, a social media account, and a smartphone--and a call to action that's both fun and engaging.

These are some of the findings of an Ipsos Reid poll conducted between August 28th and September 3rd, 2014. For this survey, a sample of 1,000 Canadians from Ipsos' Canadian online panel was interviewed online. Weighting was then employed to balance demographics to ensure that the sample's composition reflects that of the adult population according to Census data and to provide results intended to approximate the sample universe. The precision of Ipsos online polls is measured using a credibility interval. In this case, the poll is accurate to within +/ 2.8 percentage points, 19 times out of 20, had all Canadian adults been polled. All sample surveys and polls may be subject to other sources of error, including, but not limited to coverage error, and measurement error.