The Ice Bucket Challenge: who nominated you?

The waiting was often the funniest part of an Ice Bucket Challenge video. Somebody knew the cold water was coming, had agreed to this in public, and still looked rather surprised when it arrived.

Then came the names. In 2014, the challenge could pass from one person to another through a filmed nomination. Watching a familiar face take part also meant finding out who might have to respond next.

That is the visual memory. The campaign attached to it was about ALS awareness and fundraising, and the people who helped connect the challenge to that cause deserve to stay in the picture.

The chain began with people affected by ALS

The ALS Association’s account (opens in a new tab) describes Chris Kennedy challenging his cousin Jeanette Senerchia, whose husband Anthony had ALS. Jeanette’s response and nominations helped the idea move through their connections. Pat Quinn and Pete Frates, both living with ALS, and their networks were central to its wider spread.

The association describes Kennedy as believed to be the first to do the challenge in the name of ALS. That is more careful than crediting the whole campaign to whichever celebrity clip a viewer happened to see first.

The personal connections help explain how the appeal travelled. A friend asked another friend to do something visible for a cause. That person could respond, mention why they were doing it and ask others in turn. The next invitation was part of the video itself.

There was room for a viewer to enjoy a reaction while also encountering a condition they might not otherwise have been reading about that day.

Sania Mirza nominated Riteish Deshmukh

The Indian Express’s August 2014 coverage (opens in a new tab) followed the chain into Indian celebrity friendships. Sania Mirza nominated Riteish Deshmukh. He accepted while shooting Bangistan in Krakow, Poland, and went on to nominate friends including Abhishek Bachchan and Akshay Kumar.

The same report recorded Bipasha Basu responding to a nomination and passing the challenge on. These were particular people with identifiable connections, rather than an abstract claim that all of India had joined in.

The nominations added a little anticipation to the next visit to a feed. You could know exactly what the proposed video would involve and still want to see whether somebody would accept. How they reacted was another reason to watch.

It was a repeatable format with just enough room for a person’s response to make the next clip different.

The donation wasn’t visible in the same way

A splash was easy to film. The financial support and awareness behind the campaign were less obvious from a few seconds of somebody reacting to cold water. A collection of Indian celebrity clips cannot tell us how many viewers donated or how much came from India.

That makes the cause worth naming plainly when remembering the craze. ALS was why the Senerchias, Quinn, Frates and their networks were asking people to pay attention. Their participation wasn’t simply a way of supplying the internet with an entertaining reaction.

The nomination might be the part you remember waiting for. Before the next person’s name, there was a reason they were being asked.