This April, posts online showed participants of the University of South Carolina’s Speak Your Mind Ice Bucket Challenge being hit with a wave of shock as they were doused with ice-cold water. The challenge — thanking nominators, pouring ice on one’s head and nominating friends to do the same — was created by USC’s student club Mental Illness Needs Discussion to spread awareness for mental health and suicide prevention. High-schoolers and young adults led the trend on social media, generating over 200,000 posts across Instagram and TikTok.
Raising over $400,000 in donations for the nonprofit Active Minds which promotes mental health among youth, the Ice Bucket Challenge shows how momentum can help a cause gain attention — but fades quickly without a system to sustain it. The challenge went viral, with participants from around the world, yet by April 27, it had mostly subsided. While it sparked awareness, an underlying challenge for lasting action was obvious. The social media trend easily generated awareness for mental health in this case, but there was no subsequent step to channel all the momentum created, whether toward donations, protests, petitions or other resources that supply long-lasting change.
An issue with the Ice Bucket Challenge was that its trendiness on social media, while sufficient for spreading awareness, also attracted participants who were more motivated by the initiative’s social influence than the cause itself. For many, posting their video became more about joining others than making a meaningful impact.
This social influence plays a large role in what people choose to do, such as having a bucket of ice being dumped on them. People do things because they see other people doing it. The fallacy of such events is the superficiality that is generated. That is, people see the Ice Bucket Challenge, participate in its baseline phase with the iced water and that’s it. When people filmed themselves to post their participation in the trend, they didn’t mention actionable items like donating to the cause or adding clickable awareness links. Without a purpose, the momentum will die in the awareness step and never move further than that.
Though the Ice Bucket Challenge had its own difficulties, it avoided an issue that awareness months undergo: Having too many causes to support at once. To illustrate, according to the medical network Clinical Advisor, there are over 430 awareness months, weeks and days for health-related issues alone and this number doesn’t include numerous other cultural and historical observance dates. With so many movements, resources can spread thin. The amount of diversity isn’t negative, but it makes it much harder for any one cause to gain outstanding awareness and contributions necessary for change.
Another issue is when media industries become oversaturated with different movements — though this isn’t necessarily the result of negative intentions. Industries catering to their consumers will promote diversity by addressing as many awareness months as possible. This is a common example of performative activism, which is driven by a desire to expand one’s popularity or enhance public image rather than create a genuinely beneficial outcome for the cause. An example of this is rainbow washing — when companies spread awareness for LGBTQ+ related causes with the goal of improving public image without prioritizing the bettering of the LGBTQ+ community which though well-intentioned, leads to inauthentic support. Promotion without specific planning is when problems begin. Ulterior motives dilute the awareness raised through social media and companies seeking branding or sales opportunities.
The USC Ice Bucket Challenge isn’t the first of its kind. In the summer of 2014, three men living with Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a disease that leads to paralysis and has no known cure, started the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge. In six weeks, over 220 million dollars were raised, according to the Washington-based ALS Association. So, why did the ALS challenge raise over 500 times more money than USC’s? For one thing, the campaign is straightforward and specific. The ALS disease is a singular issue allowing all to unite under one cause, while the USC Ice Bucket Challenge encompasses a wide range of mental health disorders, dividing support.
For awareness efforts to make substantial impact on the community or issue it’s supporting, a clear message and good trend timing is important to help people understand what the issue is and keep attention concentrated on the cause. An extreme example is the Black Lives Matter campaign that began in 2013, stretching across social media platforms, donation outlets and protests: Three words, four syllables and easy to understand. However, the campaign’s popularity fluctuated. According to a 2023 Pew Research Center report, the daily use of the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag on X, formerly known as Twitter, was in the hundreds of thousands around the time of impactful events, most notably being the death of George Floyd, while being used much less frequently otherwise.
In all, social media does make spreading awareness easier and accessible to potential supporters. An important cause could be summed up in a 10-second video with eye-catching graphics and trending audios, but the benefits come at a cost. Awareness initiatives — whether on social media or by brands — that lack genuine connections may generate superficial engagement, where viewers only learn about the surface of the issue. Instead, active and direct elements will increase levels of connection between the viewer and the cause. The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge did this effectively, creating a strong connection between viewers in many ways, including celebrity participation — which motivated many to participate after seeing their favorite celebrity getting drenched.
For an awareness effort that is both wide-reaching and societal-influencing, people need to understand that spreading awareness alone isn’t the final piece of the puzzle. The momentum gained from awareness needs to be taken advantage of. Attention spans must be exceeded. Engagement has to be deep, not superficial and a clear path to contributions has to be made. For social media and companies, awareness is necessary, but not sufficient enough on its own.
