40acts (www.40acts.org.uk) is an online campaign from Stewardship (www.stewardship.org.uk), calling on the Christian community in the UK to create a movement of generosity during the Lent period.

Traditionally viewed as a time for fasting, repentance and ‘giving up’, the campaign allows space for such practices but set within a bigger context of the whole Easter message, celebrating God’s gift to all mankind through the death and resurrection of Jesus. 

The campaign ran for the first time in 2011, attracting almost 1750 participants, providing a daily thought and reflection, a bible verse and a simple, generous action to be performed each day.

40acts was redesigned and relaunched for 2012, and this year attracted participants from around the world.  Daily emails were sent at 7.00am, catching people at the start of the day and giving them plenty of opportunity to perform their action, as well as sharing it with their friends through social media networks. 

By the end of the campaign, 40acts had achieved:

12,600 unique website visitors

38,236 webpage views

5051 daily email subscribers

1272 Facebook fans

692 Twitter followers

Reflecting on the campaign’s success this year, I would highlight the following as contributing factors:

Simple & Accessible – Avoiding Christian jargon where at all possible, 40acts keeps things simple.  Reflections were easy to read and the actions were small and achievable steps in a life long journey of generosity.

Biblical – Generosity as a theme is growing in popularity in the UK, but 40acts remained very clearly rooted in biblical generosity, which was greatly appreciated by our largely Christian audience and well respected by those of other or no faith.

Personal – Reflections from our contributors were always personal, using real life stories to demonstrate clear, biblical wisdom.  Also, by delivering most of the content by email first thing each morning, we were able to feed in to the participant’s personal preparations for the day ahead.

Diversity – Our contributors came from a wide range of denominations, traditions and experiences.  From internationally regarded Christian leaders to the youngest and most unknown, our followers could relate to those they were hearing from, which in turn encouraged them to express each action in their own, diverse way.

Communal – Creating strong networks on Facebook and Twitter gave 40acts a much stronger community feel this year, also allowing the campaign to go viral.  Comments from these networks were also shared on our daily emails, allowing everyone to feel part of the discussion and activity.

Neutral – Unlike other seasonal campaigns, our only motive was generosity.  As a non-fundraising organisation, we recognise the power of our neutrality to speak to people about giving, without an ulterior motive.

Our challenge for 2013 – how do we reach 10,000? Or 100,000? Or 1,000,000?!