[Infographic] Your 'Ice Bucket' Dollars at Work

Although it couldn't have predicted it, the ALS Association struck gold when it introduced the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge last summer. And, as we reported a week or so ago, scientists are crediting the funds raised through the campaign — more than $115 million in the U.S. and an estimated $220 million globally — with supporting a major breakthrough in the search for a treatment for the always-fatal disease. The infographic below breaks down how the dollars raised through last year's the challenge have been used.

 

As fundraisers and social media experts are learning, however, "viral-ness" is a hard thing to create — and an even harder thing to replicate. This year's challenge failed to generate the same kind of enthusiasm, awareness, and dollars as the original — although that's unlikely to discourage the folks at the ALS Association. As Melanie Roach-Bekos, executive director of the association's Wisconsin chapter, told Jim Stingl, a columnist for the Milwaukee-Wisconsin Journal Sentinel: "We need people to realize we're still in this fight. The ice bucket challenge last year brought us up to date. Here was this underfunded and ignored disease for seventy-five years. So finally I feel like today we have the attention and the medical research working on it that we should have had for the last couple of decades."

The Ice Bucket Challenge will return next August. In the meantime, we sincerely hope the funds raised through the first two challenges lead to a cure for this terrible disease.