"Silly though the Ice Bucket Challenge may seem now, it had far-reaching effects. It raised a reported two hundred and twenty million dollars worldwide for A.L.S. organizations; in just eight weeks, the American A.L.S. Association received thirteen times as much in contributions as what it had in the whole of the preceding year. Public awareness rose: the challenge was the fifth most popular Google search for all of 2014. Brian Fredrick, the vice-president for communications and development at the A.L.S. Association, told me, “The challenge suddenly made a lot of people who probably didn’t even know who Lou Gehrig was aware of the disease. It really changed the face of A.L.S. forever.”...
It’s true that the vast majority of the people who made A.L.S. donations during the challenge haven’t done so again. But contributions to the A.L.S. Association have stayed about twenty-five per cent higher than in the year before the challenge, and the average donor age dropped from above fifty to thirty-five."
I was a critiquer, but I was eventually turned around by the number of ALS researchers I've talked to who were genuinely getting more money and having conversations about more projects and seeing their work become more high-profile.
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