Flip Cup 3 Sees Major Growth: Here’s How We Did It

The Third Annual Charity Flip Cup Tournament has come and gone, baby.

While we’re stilling riding high on our record-breaking fundraiser, we wouldn’t have been able to achieve this huge success without the help of our generous sponsors and the more than 300 flippers. This year we raised more than $14,000 for the National MS Society of the Greater Delaware Valley and the talented, inspiring and vibrant folks over at Mazeppa Productions. The tournament was filled with laughter, sweat, anguish and tears, and we ultimately crowned a brand-new winning team. Meet the new champs, One and Done!

Planning for this event started back in the beginning of February. As we moved into our third year, we doubled down on a successful algorithm for marketing the tournament on social media. Here are some of our biggest takeaways.

Content is key.

Yes. You keep hearing that over and over again, but it’s time to listen. Beginning our rollout back in February, we planned well in advance how CBM’s voice should be augmented surrounding the tournament. We kept a few simple rules in mind:

Share information, don’t just deliver orders.
Be a friend.
Highlight the important details.
Be funny, thoughtful, powerful. Be yourself.

When you develop a voice that resonates with your audience (as opposed to simply “selling” your event), you’ll find that your excitement surrounding your event becomes contagious, and the engagement (and ticket sales) will more than likely stack up.

In the “biz”, we call that organic growth and it’s very cool.

What’s the big picture?

The right imagery will help give you the results you need. For the Third Annual Charity Flip Cup Tournament, we paired our content with all of the best action shots to from last year’s event to truly capture the raw emotion of Flip Cup. “Show, don’t tell,” as they say. Although it might be tricky deciding which image is the best, always remember less is more.

Last year’s second-place team, basking in the warmth of their trophy.

Get some advertising going.

Word of mouth is a powerful tool in social media, but sometimes you have to break the big guns out. With social media advertising, you’re limited to a set number of characters, so make sure your header evokes a reaction. (Read above: content is key.) For Flip Cup 3, we ran ads across major social platforms and saw some big results by tracking their page view conversions and corresponding ticket sales.

Here are some quick stats on that Instagram ad:

Users Reached: 13,740

Post Engagements: 921

Nice.

Cash in on those custom Snapchat filters.

Take advantage of developing social platforms

Snapchat is here to stay. Recently they’ve allowed for their users to create custom filters for events, special occasions, etc. So of course we created a custom Flip Cup filter, which was used 152 times throughout the course of the event and reached more than 6,000 users. By investing in a custom Snapchat filter, we effectively extended our branding across another social dimension — one that’s growing exponentially in popularity — and exposing Flip Cup 3 to an entirely new audience.

As we wrap another year of the Charity Flip Cup Tournament, we’ve seen this tournament grow and evolve into a highly successful event. We wouldn’t be able to achieve a sellout status three years in a row if it wasn’t for our incredible sponsors, our diligent marketing team and for everyone who came to flip some cups for charity.

Who’s ready for Flip Cup 4? Will a new winner be crowned? We’ll see you in a year.