What has made the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge so popular? It was a simple suggestion: they started by challenging celebrities and people who one might not expect to be OK with looking silly on camera to either donate to the cause or dump a bucked of ice water on their heads.
Many celebrities ended up doing both. Charlie Sheen dumped $10K in cash on his head. Patrick Stewart used the ice for his whiskey and wrote a cheque. Then, non-celebrities started joining in. Local media outlets challenged businesses. Friends and family challenged each other. Celebrities started getting more creative by challenging anyone who watched the whole video. Neil Gaiman even challenged Death.
I think, one of the key reasons it has continued to stick is that it puts people on the same stage as celebrities — kids, especially seem to find this exciting and reason enough to take part.
Some have been very creative, doing domino-style soakings or creating Rube Goldberg style contraptions. Not everyone thought it through, of course, so now there are #icebucketfail videos where the whole bucket hits the victim, knocking them over, or where the person upending the bucket trips and gets soaked.
Most importantly though, is that many more people now know more about brutally debilitating ALS, and the huge spike in funds raised will echo for some time — more has been raised in the past month than in the past several years combined.
Yesterday, our niece did the challenge and she nominated kiddo. Kiddo took her turn today…
…and nominated Cthulhu. Which may have triggered the end of our world…
If however we survive the wrath of Cthulhu, please join us in donating to the ALS Association.