What has The Ice Bucket Challenge has done for ALS?

          ALS is a very vicious disease and many don’t live long once diagnosed. The Ice Bucket Challenge was started to raise awareness about ALS and has had a lot of success. People all over the world have been part of or involved with the Ice Bucket Challenge. The Ice Bucket Challenge has helped the ALS Association a great deal due to how it made more people aware, educated, and more people have donated.

            It hard to say who actually started the challenge, but once it did start it took off. The challenge has been done from your average American to the president of the United States. Once famous people start doing something everyone else will start as well. According to Lucy Townsend “There have been in excess of 2.4 million ice bucket-related videos posted on Facebook, and 28 million people have uploaded, commented on or liked ice bucket-related posts.On image sharing website Instagram there have been 3.7 million videos uploaded with the hashtags #ALSicebucketchallenge and #icebucketchallenge.” To the regards of the hashtags about thirty percent of the tweets in the United States are about ALS. Obviously due to social media people all over the world are more aware, which leads to people donating more to charity to help ALS foundations.

For example, reported by BBC News “From 29 July to 28 August this year ALS received $98.2m - compared with $2.7m donated during the same period last year.” This means that ALS has received more in one month then ever in the past year. People were donating at an exceptionally fast paced. The challenge has helped the ALS association a great deal. According to data company Dataviz “From 1 August to 27 August this year, the ALS Wikipedia page had 2,717,754 views. This compared with the 1,662,842 people who had visited the page during the whole of the preceding 12 months.” People are becoming more aware and educated about ALS. It shows how only a few knew about this disease and now it seems as if everyone knows. It would probably be weird now a day to find someone that does not know about the disease. Since people are donated a lot more they are becoming educated on ALS so they know where there money is going.

 It was reported by BBC News that the 

Average daily visits to the ALS association website were about 17,500 before the ice bucket challenge, compared with the peak of 4.5 million visits on 20 August (of which 83% were new to the site). During the past month there have been about 30 million visitors in total. And as of 29 August the ice bucket challenge had 4,483,726 Twitter mentions. ALS Twitter followers had increased from 8,975 in early July to 21,100.

 Since more people are visiting there website they must know more about ALS. They probably learned what it does to the body and mind and this is due to the fact the donated. No one could have predicted that the Ice Bucket Challenge would be so popular and help as much as it did. The challenge was something that come out of nowhere without warning and took the world and especially the United States by storm.