You see on Facebook a video that someone has posted. You click on it and that person then says they were nominated to dump a bucket of water on their head. They proceed with dumping the cold water on their head and then tell 3 other people that they need to dump ice water on their heads as well within the next 24 hours.

That was the fad of this past summer, participating in the Ice Bucket Challenge, but how did it all start? Well the first time that the Ice Bucket challenge was linked to ALS was on July 15th when a man in Sarasota, Florida named Chris Kennedy had participated in the Ice Bucket Challenge. At that time the Ice Bucket Challenge was just a challenge in which you dump ice water on your head and you donate $10 to a charity of your choice, and Kennedy decided to donate for ALS as he had a relative with ALS. After that it kept going down to people and they kept choosing ALS, and thus it turned into the “ALS Ice Bucket Challenge.”

However, it has turned away from the donating and awareness to people dumping ice water on their heads to raise awareness of this terrible disease and raise money for it. Someone nominates you to do the Ice bucket challenge, and so you do it, after all, you’re doing it to raise awareness, right? Not necessarily.

By participating in the Ice Bucket Challenge without knowledge of ALS or motivation to find out what ALS is, you are just participating in slacktivism. Slacktivism is many people’s way of taking part in an awareness campaign with doing little to no work in their participation.

For example, I don’t see a lot of videos that talk about what ALS is or why it is important to fundraise for ALS. Most videos get right to the point and say that they were nominated to take part in the Ice Bucket challenge and proceed to dump ice water on their heads. This isn’t exactly the epitome of awareness, let alone fundraising. Sometimes, there is no mention of ALS and the person just says it is the Ice Bucket Challenge.

Now that’s not to say the campaign has been a total bust, in total the ALS  Association has raised over $100 million. However, how much of that came from the Ice Bucket Challenge? Well as of August 27th, over 1,000 celebrities have done the challenge. There were roughly 653,000 videos of the Ice Bucket Challenge on YouTube, and about 573,000 likes on the Ice Bucket Challenge Facebook page. If all those people donated $100 (the highest average money donated per person in a day), the ALS Association would have raised over $122 million dollars. However, at that point, only $88 million had been raised.