HomeEntertainment8 Facts About The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge You Need To Know

8 Facts About The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge You Need To Know

Remember when pretty much everyone was having buckets of ice cold water thrown over their heads in the name of charity? The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge had loads of people around the world filming themselves getting drenched in icy cold before nominating someone else to do the same. If you got nominated, you either had to donate to charity, or get drenched; a lot of people simply did both. It came from nowhere and before you knew it, everyone had done it and it was never heard of again. Check out these 8 facts about the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge you need to know.

  1. The charity

via Howitworksdaily.com
via Howitworksdaily.com

The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge was started in the summer of 2014 and is now an annual event held to raise money to find treatments and hopefully a cure for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a disease that affects nerve cells in the spinal cord and the brain and can lead to paralysis and loss of muscle control. Stephen Hawking suffers from this condition.

2. The money raised

via Forbes.com
via Forbes.com

A ton of money was raised by the challenge, thanks to loads of people putting videos of themselves getting drenched online. In fact, over $115 million was raised for ALSA, the ALS Association. In Britain, over £7 million was raised for the Motor Neurone Disease Association, the country’s equivalent of ALSA.

3. The views

via Youtube.com
via Youtube.com

Videos of people doing the challenge were watched over 440 million times over the summer of 2014. More than 17 million ALS Ice Bucket Challenge videos were uploaded to Facebook.

4. The 2015 challenge

via Vice.com
via Vice.com

Thanks to the ridiculously huge popularity of the 2014 challenge, the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge was held in 2015, though it wasn’t nearly as successful as the 2014 challenge, nor did it attract as much media attention. The 2015 challenge did still manage to raise about $1 million.

5. The purpose of it all

via Thenational.ae
via Thenational.ae

The whole point of the challenge is that you donate or you get a bucket of ice-cold water thrown over you. The challenge did become more about the bucket of water than donating money to charity, as in the UK only about 10% of people who did the challenge actually donated. The figure isn’t much higher for other countries.

6. The criticisms

via Forbes.com
via Forbes.com

While the challenge has raised a lot of money for various charities, it’s attracted a fair bit of criticism. People have criticized it for being more about the stunt than the charity (i.e. only 10% of participants actually donating) and some have mentioned that the amount raised should be a lot higher, especially considering lots of rich celebrities took part.

7. The water

via Thedailyskid.com
via Thedailyskid.com

It’s estimated that all of the water used in the millions of ice bucket challenges across the globe would fill 15 Olympic swimming pools.

8. The success

via Time.com
via Time.com

During the 2014 ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, the amount of money raised for ALS was more than 40 times the amount raised during the same period of the previous year.

James Gibson
James Gibson
I'm a Classics graduate and have been writing for over three years. Hopefully going to go into novel writing some day. I'm mostly interested in theme parks and roller coasters - I've been on 300 coasters and plan on going on lots more!

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