If you’ve been online in the past three weeks, you’ve probably heard about the World Cup. Scratch that—if you haven’t been in a coma for the past two weeks, I know you’ve heard about the World Cup. Right now, 32 teams from 32 countries are duking it out at an international soccer tournament in Brazil for the right to call themselves the world champions of football.

As knockout rounds begin, the teams to look out for are Brazil, Netherlands, Colombia, Argentina, Belgium, and Germany. The stars to watch include Neymar Jr., Lionel Messi, James Rodriguez, and Thomas Muller, to name a few.

I know this not because I like sports or because I’ve been following the games religiously, or even because I have a best friend who keeps harping me to watch the games with him (although that last part is actually true), but rather because I have a Twitter and Facebook account. By that I mean, I’ve seen the memes, watched the GIFs, read a fair share of the articles, and seen the commercials. (Did you miss Gatorade’s Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo one?) FIFA, the brains behind the World Cup, has done a bang-up job of making me, a sports no-nothing with an allergy to exercise, painfully aware of and concerned about what’s going on in the tournament. How?

Evangelists.

I’m not just talking about the brand ambassadors—although McDonald’s, Nike, Adidas, Beats by Dre, and more than enough other FIFA partners have all been masterfully surfing the World Cup wave—I’m talking about everyone: people who are just passionate about the “product” FIFA offers every four years. The World Cup is an international competition that pits nations against each other and the very best against the very best. Who wouldn’t expect people get excited?

If FIFA is the brains behind the World Cup, fans are the brawn. They have helped to flood Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and YouTube with exhilarating tweets, goal clips, pictures, and vampire memes. Twitter even introduced hashflags to help us celebrate our favorite teams, fostering network growth by strategically harvesting community niches. Already, news sources are reporting that the World Cup will prove to be the biggest social media event ever. (And, yes, there is a different news source linked behind every one of those words.)

FIFA has managed to illustrate for us the value of evangelists. In marketing terms, evangelists are individuals who believe so strongly in a particular product or service that they freely try to convince others to use it. Doesn’t that cover almost every World Cup fan on the planet? They’ve been helping FIFA advertise since before the first World Cup match even happened.

So what? I’m not FIFA.

Duly noted. You may not have something as sensational as the World Cup to offer your audience, either—but I guarantee you there are people out there who believe just as strongly in the product, service, or cause that you’re offering as some of these soccer fans who believe in the World Cup. The challenge is simply locating and leveraging them.

Recently the Varkey GEMS Foundation, a London-based nonprofit established to improve educational standards around the world, has done just that in its own campaign. Since announcing the Global Teacher Prize in March, a one million dollar award which will serve as the teaching profession’s equivalent of the Nobel Peace Prize, Varkey GEMS has brought together partners and evangelists, and invited key audiences to engage. Fission Strategy has helped the Global Teacher Prize gain international traction online during the World Cup by emphasizing the role of soccer coaches as teachers in the lives of athletes.

For the next five months, the Global Teacher Prize is accepting applications and nominations from teachers and those who have benefitted from them, in an effort to find the most exceptional teacher in the world. In November, members of the Global Teacher Academy will review every application and select one teacher to receive the Global Teacher Prize for this year. These Academy members include Kevin Spacey, award-winning actor and lead star of House of Cards, and Esperanza Spalding, a world-renowned jazz musician (and my childhood crush), among many prominent educational experts, journalists, entrepreneurs, company leaders, and scientists from around the globe. Varkey GEMS has strategically enlisted these key influencers, along with TeachPitch, Womensphere, Bill Clinton and others, in order to increase the scope of the Global Teacher Prize’s reach.

FIFA’s doing it, the Global Teacher Prize is doing it—everybody’s doing it. Are you? How can you implement a similar strategy in your own organizational campaigns? Who are the evangelists in your midst that strongly believe in what you have to offer? Have you explored ways to leverage them in order to engage larger audiences?

How can you be FIFA in your field?

Feel free to contact our team at Fission if you’d like to talk. And share this post if you enjoyed it! We’d appreciate your comments below.