In the last month, everyone from Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates to former President George W Bush has been doused.
The internet and airwaves are awash in videos of people taking the ice bucket challenge to raise funds for ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis), also known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease.
And now others are co-opting the bucket challenge for their own causes.
Actor Matt Damon, for instance, dumped toilet water over his head to call attention to his passion – safe drinking water.
Actor Orlando Jones of the television series Sleepy Hollow showered himself with bullets in the wake of black teenager Michael Brown’s shooting death by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri.
“I’m challenging myself to listen without prejudice, to love without limits and to reverse the hate,” he said. “So that’s my challenge – to me. And, hopefully, you’ll accept this challenge, too.”
But the success for ALS is the kind of thing you can’t really replicate – even if you did it first.
In late June, about a month before the ice bucket challenge exploded, University of Arizona woman’s basketball coach Niya Butts took the “cold water challenge.” After being doused with a huge plastic cooler, Butts gave her coaching rivals 48 hours to do the same or donate $250 to the Kay Yow Cancer Fund – named for the college coach who succumbed to the disease in 2009. That challenge – #Chillin4Charity – has raised only about $75 000 (R799 713) so far.
“We didn’t raise millions,” Butts said on Wednesday.
“But we raised awareness of millions.”
The campaign has had more than 80 000 tweets, 100 000 retweets more than 215 million Twitter reaches, said Susan Donohoe, the Yow fund’s executive director.
Approaching $100m, the viral fund-raising campaign has put the ALS group into the top ranks for medical charity donations. Since the end of July, the money has been sloshing in at a rate of about $9m a week. Last year, from July 29 to August 26, the group raised just $2.6m.
It’s caught everyone off-guard, none more so than the ALS Association folks. But they know this is likely a one-off phenomenon, and the group now faces the task of spending all that money wisely. Research, care and advocacy are the group’s three main missions, but officials say they don’t know yet exactly how they’ll use the astonishing windfall.
The basic rules of the ice bucket challenge are: someone issues a challenge – that you allow yourself to be doused with a bucket of ice and water, like American coaches who win big games. Then, the challengee has 24 hours to make a $100 donation to the ALS Association or submit to the water torture. Or do both. And then you challenge someone else.
Jonah Berger, author of the book Contagious: Why Things Catch On, says it’s like a modern-day chain letter – except, in this case, everyone will know if you break the chain.
“It has a lot of the key ingredients that often make people want to share things,” says Berger, a marketing professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. “It gives people lots of social currency to be part of it. It makes you look good. It makes you look smart and in the know. And it’s always hard to back down from a challenge.”
Sapa-AP