Crowdsourced images lend teacher campaign an aura of authenticity

The importance of images in online and social communication is exploding. Popular experts like Guy Kawasaki insist that no post should be unaccompanied by a great image.

Recognizing that bloggers, journalists, advertisers, and others are seeking images to share with their teaching-focused content, the Carnegie Corporation of New York—which makes grants to education nonprofits—conceived a campaign to get members of 40 different organizations to shoot and share images to populate a photo library. Ultimately, the group made more than 700 outstanding royalty-free images available to reflect the idea of great, inspirational teachers. To make it even easier, the contribution of photos was managed through a Facebook app.

To make the entry even more compelling, the results aligned well with the goals, including increased engagement of the organization’s partners and considerable attention from the press and social media. In recognition of these remarkable feats, we award the Carnegie Corporation of New York top honors in the Best Use of Social Media category of PR Daily’s 2014 Nonprofit PR Awards.

We commend the members of the team behind this inspirational project: Karen Theroux, Deanna Lee, Michael Astolfi, Karoline Hassfurter, Piotr Kuczynski, Eleanor Lerman, Daniel Um, Ron Sexton, George Soule, Pat Pagnotta, and Adrienne Faraci.

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