Archive for April, 2005
April 25th, 2005 at 10:52pm
Under Trendspotting+ fundraising
The UK SocietyGuardian recently reported on plans for a new TV show that will let the public choose which charities receive millions of pounds of lottery cash.
The show is being developed by ITV in conjunction with the Big Lottery Fund and is intended to get people more involved in the lottery. It follows on the success of an earlier BBC2 television series that asked viewers to vote on which historic UK buldings should receive restoration funding.
It seems somehow inevitable in the era of reality tv shows that a format for competing charity causes would emerge. If successful it could encourage the growth of other forms of charity reputation systems, such as online rating systems or “most frequently supported” indexes, along the same lines that Amazon.com uses to make book recommendations to their customers. (see earlier blog post on this topic)
Certainly there are considerable concerns about this approach to governing a fund as large as the Big Lottery Fund..
Critics fear that BLF’s more populist approach will favour children’s charities and government initiatives at the expense of organisations working with the most marginalised groups in society.
The fund has already come under fire for siphoning off £45m of lottery money to set up a new government-led body, the Schools Food Trust, following the media frenzy surrounding Jamie Oliver’s campaign to improve school dinners.
By irishg
April 9th, 2005 at 10:46am
Under Trendspotting+ What's working+ fundraising
CNN is blogging. Dave Barry is blogging. Yankee fans are blogging, as are roughly 8 million other Americans. Blogs, journals posted on the web, are quickly becoming the new “it†of the internet. But do blogs have a role in an effective fundraising strategy, or are they still too new for the nonprofit sector?
Jenn Thomson of Changing our World is one of the first experts in the nonprofit sector to look at how organizations are getting into the blogging fad. In her recent article (quoted above) at OnPhilanthropy.com, Thomson profiles a selection of early adopters who are using blogs for support, advocacy, and campaign work, and provides some strategic tips on getting a successful nonprofit blog up and running. Her question: “are blogs still too new for the nonprofit sector” remains open.
Blogs are just starting to enter the Internet mainstream and we’re likely to see many different approaches to blogging evolve as different types of organizations explore how the blogging phenomenon works for them.
Blogging is more than just a new format for publishing web pages - it’s really a new framework for organizations to feed information out to their supporters on an ongoing basis. We have become accustomed to the picture of the Internet as a huge information library — filled with ever-expanding bookshelves holdng all types of individual webpages. Tthe most popular tools we use to find information on the internet — search engines — resemble the catalogue indexes at libraries and present the intenret primarily organized by content: title, subject, author.
Blogging introduces a powerful “expiry date” bias into the publication of information. Blogs are all about what’s happening right now. Only the very newest information ends up at the top of a blog or in its RSS feed. Older posts are pushed down, eventually into archives that are only rarely accessed. This means that, by and large, blog postings are transitory — not permanent — with a focus is on providing the information that’s relevant right now, rather than building comprehensive information resources, because it will all be gone in a matter of a few short days or weeks. A challenge for organizations will be to find sources for that transitory type of information within their scope of the work..
Blogging also presents a challenge to organizations to loosen control of their public messaging, and allow for a diversity of voices. Organizations do not write blogs, individuals write blogs - and individuals have unique voices that do not always toe the line 100% with official communication strategies. The success of an organization’s blogging efforts may rely on their ability to give some “operating room” to their primary authors — to allow individual views to show through, and provide the readers with a real, human viewpoint and not just a sanitized, institutional communication package.
The future of blogging is very much up in the air, but the practice is growing and is starting to find a place in the nonprofit sector. This Global Fundraising Innovation blog itself is an experiment to see if a “consultants” blog can find a niche and build an audience. It’s been a curious, generally encouraging experience so far, and I was happy to see mention in Jenn’s article that it can take up to six months for a blog to find its audience.
By irishg
April 7th, 2005 at 03:31am
Under fundraising
By irishg
April 7th, 2005 at 03:27am
Under fundraising
By irishg
April 2nd, 2005 at 02:16am
Under fundraising
This is the second of a three part series looking at Online Engagement: an integrated approach combining fundraising, advocacy, volunteer mobilization and activism to strengthen and grow an organization’s active supporter base.
Part Two: Climbing the Ladder of Engagement
A couple of years ago, I attended a workshop on online activism where Stephen Legault of Actionworks.ca introduced the “Ladder of Engagement” — a model for visualizing how organizations can build a base of more committed supporters for activism, campaigning, advocacy and fundraising.
The Ladder of Engagement sets out a simple scale for ranking different activities that online supporters may enage in. Low on the ladder are quick and easy items such as signing an online petition or forwarding an email to a friend. At the top of the ladder are the most involving forms of activism, including meeting with elected officials, organizing local actions, and making donations.
| High Engagement |
|
Recruit friends/family |
|
|
Upgrade monthly donation
Signup for monthly giving
Renew single donation
Make single donation
Write a letter
Attend a ‘real world’ event
Sign petition
Viral / Tell a friend
Send an epostcard
Subscribe to e-Alerts / Issue Alerts
Subscribe to eNewsletter
Enter a contest |
| Low Engagement |
|
Visit website |
Over time, an individual supporter would be expected to engage in a variety activities, both high and low on the ladder. The goal of an online engagement strategy is not just get increased numbers of people involved, but also to encourage them to climb the ladder of engagement.
Some of an organization’s supporters will climb the ladder of engagement as a natural evolution of their relationship with that organization. Others can be assisted by specific messaging that encourages them to deepen their commitment and invite them to do more. This must be done carefully so that the past activities they have taken part in are not de-valued, but that they are also shown some of the higher steps on the ladder.
A Thank you/Acknowledgement message that someone may receive after participating in an action or activity can be one of the key tools for encouraging them to climb the ladder — for instance, encouraging someone who has just signed an online petition to subscribe an eAlert list on this issue, or asking a new online donor to forward a current campaign message to a number of their friends or colleagues.
The ladder of engagement is also sometimes presented as a pyramid - illustrating that relatively few of an organization’s supporters will climb to the highest steps on the ladder, and most will remain in the lower-engagement levels. One of the ways to expand the upper levels of the pyramid is to broaden participation at the lower levels - the “base” - so a strategy to expand numbers of supporters engaged at a lower levels is a means to achieving greater participation through to the upper levels.
Next: Part Three: Boosting your online engagement
By irishg