Trendspotting
May 18th, 2009 at 04:40am
Under Trendspotting+ fundraising
Peter Dietz of Social Actions is launching a blog series on the topic of ‘embedded philanthropy’.
From the RED campaign to CREDO cellular phone service, embedded philanthropy has emerged as an innovative and scalable form of corporate social responsibility. Social Actions is convening the “Embedded Philanthropy Blog Series, Sponsored by Telecom for Charity” in order to draw attention to the practice of embedding donations to nonprofits in the sale of commercial goods and services.
офис столовеSocial Actions has invited leading philanthropy bloggers to respond to the statement, “Embedded philanthropy is transforming business as usual for the public good.” Between May 19th and May 31st, a number of bloggers will post their responses to this statement.
> Read the full post
According to philanthropy blogger Lucy Bernholz, the term embedded philanthropy refers to “the (apparently) increasingly common practice of building a philanthropic gift into another, unrelated, financial transaction.”
On the NonProfit Matrix, ‘embedded philanthropy’ maps most closely onto the Charity Shopping category, which includes online shopping portals such as iGive, DonationStreet and aGoodCause.
By irishg
May 16th, 2009 at 05:34pm
Under Trendspotting
Interesting excerpt from The Crowdfunding Wiki:
Crowdfunding, inspired by crowdsourcing,
describes the collective cooperation, attention and trust by people who
network and pool their money together, usually via the Internet, in
order to support efforts initiated by other people or organizations. Crowdfunding
occurs for any variety of purposes, from disaster relief to citizen
journalism to artists seeking support from fans, to political campaigns.
Crowdfunding can replace the need for specialized
grant applications or other more formal and traditional fundraising
techniques with that of a more casual, yet powerful, approach based on
crowd participation. Examples of the basis of Crowdfunding can be seen in Cooperatives
(co-ops) around the world. However, the Internet can provide new
streamlined approaches to quickly imitating the co-op model for
low-level and/or sudden needs (ie. disaster relief, travel expenses,
legal fees and so on.). It is this reason that a term be used to
encompass the act of informally generating and distributing funds,
usually online, by groups of people for specific social, personal,
entertainment or other purposes.
> Visit the Crowdfunding wiki
> ARTICLE: Crowdfunding – a Web 2.0 twist on what community fundraisers have always done?
By irishg
June 8th, 2005 at 11:36pm
Under Trendspotting+ fundraising
As promised, I’ve got the MSF Austria mobile phone results:
Since 1999, Mobilkom Austria has been a partner with MSF. We partnered to create an SMS donation platform together to 2001. Since that time, the money raised through SMS has grown tremendously.
The tsunami-related campaign took place in 3 phases:
Phase 1 – Mobilkom Austria sent a request for donations to its subscriber base of approximately 500,000 individuals, asking for individuals to call the number:
0664 660 1000 to give anywhere from 5 to 70 Euros. Each prospective donor could choose an amount and when sent, were asked to confirm their gift.
After confirming their gift, Mobilkom Austria sent a thank
you message on behalf of MSF. The amount donated was transferred by Mobilkom Austria to MSF.
Phase 2 – After thanking the donor, an automatic inquiry was sent asking whether the SMS donor would like to be contacted by telephone by MSF.
Phase 3 – If they texted ‘yes’ then they received a call on their mobile phone. 60% of the donors said yes to a call and 50% of those contacted converted to a monthly gift.
282,000 Euros was donated in the SMS gift phase. Still haven’t got numbers for monthly committed gifts.
By Michael Johnston
June 3rd, 2005 at 12:11am
Under Trendspotting+ What's working+ fundraising
Last week I had the pleasure of sharing with nonprofit fundraisers from Austria, Slovakia, Romania, and Hungary. For all of these countries, SMS - text messaging via cellular phones is a quickly emerging fundraising option. North American fundraisers should be watching carefully. In Austria, MSF raised 5% of total tsunami dollars through text messaging. Donors, through traditional media and participating mobile carriers, were given the chance to donate small single gifts — approximately 20 dollars as a single gift.
It’s not that single donation that was intriguing — North Americans started giving in small numbers over their cell phones during the tsunami disaster period — but it was MSF Austria’s successful conversion of these mobile phone donors to committed monthly donors. 50%! Yes, 50% of their single gift mobile phone donors converted to monthly committed giving via their bank accounts when contacted after making their single gifts.
Everyone think about that for a bit and see whether we shouldn’t all be testing text message fundraising and a monthly committed follow up.
In the post-communist countries, text messaging is catching on fast for fundraising. WWF Hungary is launching a text-message campaign to raise money for its first ever Danube-focused fundraising campaign. The Danube runs through Budapest is a vital part of both the country’s ecosystem and history. I’ll keep you posted on how their campaign has done. I also heard about a successful text-message fundraising campaign in Slovakia. Similarly, when I get results I’ll pass them on.
My final note’s one for North American fundraisers. Text messaging services are very low cost to start up. It’s time to hear about success stories from other countries. I’d love to hear about it.
By Michael Johnston
May 25th, 2005 at 01:11am
Under Trendspotting+ What's working
I’ve been watching a trend in online advocacy campaigns that is starting to be picked up by online fundraisers.
Chaining is the idea of linking online actions together so that completing one action leads into the call to another action. For instance, the feedback message that appears after someone signs an online petition can include a specific followup action such as forwarding a message to friends, or joining a mailing list.
Chaining is also an important way to captialize on the online giving “moment” and encourage supporters into deeper or alternate forms of engagement. A supporter who makes an online donation is acting out of a strong sense of connection with that organization, and may be very open to other recruitment messages - for cyberactions, or volunters, or even higher forms of giving. This is where the tactic of “chaining” can be most effectively employed. Online donation confirmation pages and autogenerated Thank You emails are the best opportunities for chaining, as they appear or are sent within seconds of the donation transaction, and can engage the donor before he or she moves on to something else.
Here’s an example chaining action from the Thank You email autogenerated by an online donation to emergency relief program. The chaining action asks the new donor to engage in a simple viral action followup by forwarding a pre-wrtten recruitment message to their friends/family/personal contacts.
** Other ways you can help **
Tell your friends, family and associates about your commitment to help Oxfam. Cut and paste the message below into a new email message you can forward to people you think would support Oxfam’s emergency response program.
————– Message start ———————
Hi,
I wanted to let you know that I have recently decided to support Oxfam Canada’s Emergency Response Program. That means I have committed to making a small, regular monthly donation that will be used by Oxfam to help communities at risk around the world to prepare for and recover from tragedies like the Asian Tsunami that killed 300,000 people last year.
We’ve all seen how emergency relief was urgently needed by communities that were caught in the path of the Tsunami. Oxfam relief operations were active on the ground just 24 hours after Tsunami. Within 72 hours Oxfam had begun to deliver vital aid supplies to the worst affected communities.
Oxfam’s Emergency Response Program ensures that Oxfam will be ready to respond immediately when disasters happen anywhere in the world. As well, the program will help communities at risk to prepare for disaster, and minimize the loss of life.
Every hour counts in saving lives. That’s why I hope you’ll join me in supporting Oxfam’s Emergency Response Program and help make sure that emergency relief arrives as quickly as possible when the next disaster strikes.
Please click the following link to find out more about how you can support Oxfam’s Emergency Response Program:
http://www.oxfam.ca/emergencyresponseprogram
Thank you.
————— Message end ——————–
Chaining actions should be simple, and require just a few clicks of a mouse button. Signing petitions, sending e-postcards, subscribing to email mailing lists, and surveys are all good chaining actions.
Chaining is part of a strategy that engages donors more widely as supporters and participants in different areas activity - not just fundraising but also campaigning, advocacy, public awareness and volunteerism. Chain can help you get the most value out of your donors and engage them as key participants in other activities. Chaining is also a central process in the construction of a campaign “gauntlet” that is designed to swell the ranks of campaign supporters as quickly as possible by stringing together a series of signup and spread-the-word actions into a single stream.
By irishg
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
March 11th, 2005 at 05:13am
Under Trendspotting
This is the first of a three part series looking at online engagement as a strategic approach to integrate fundraising, advocacy, volunteer mobilization and activism to strengthen and grow an organization’s active supporter base.
Part One: Online Engagement: A holistic approach to fundraising, marketing and activism
“We can’t send that fundraising appeal to our list today because someone just sent out an e-newsletter. We’ll have to wait ’til next week.”
Does this sound familiar?
As nonprofits have become increasingly active on the internet, overlap and conflict seems to have increased as well between the departments responsible for fundraising, member services, campaigns, volunteers and communications . These silos of actiivity tend to operate more independently in the offline world, but the internet has created a set of common resources - notably homepage geography, and email subscription lists - that everyone wants access to. And that can lead to conflict and competition.
At least, that’s the view from inside the organization. From the outside, web site visitors and email subscribers have little or no awareness of the inner workings and politics, and it surprises and confuses them when the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing. From the outside, all of the points of contact blend together into a single ongoing relationship between the supporter and the organization, and every single communications activity can have multiple connections - and multiple effects/impacts.
For instance, an email fundraising campaign may have a primary aim of motivating a donation, but it could at the same time be profiling an important issue in an e-advocacy campaign, and could also drive the donor to an online action. There may be considerable overlap both in the content of the message, and also in the specific target audience (email contact lists). It makes sense for both silos of activity to have a more complete knowledge of the interaction history with their contact lists, and of how the specific communication piece they are planning fits into that large picture.
A fully developed online engagement strategy sets out a holistic model for understanding how organizations establish and nurture ongoing relationships with individual supporters, and also how those relationships can be tapped to deliver new energy and ideas into all aspects of an organization’s activities
An online engagement strategy incorporates fundraising, volunteer recruitment and mobilization, plus advocacy, action and PR, and recognizes that supporter action can take a variety of different forms, from making a donation, to volunteering, to participating in an advocacy action, or passing on info. to friends/family/colleagues. Instead of separating these activities into different categories based on department or campaign area, the engagement model sets out a more complete picture of the relationship an individual supporter has with an organization, where they could be a donor, an advocate, a volunteer and an activist all at the same time.
Central themes of online engagement:
Supporters as “us”, not “‘them”
Your supporters should be viewed as more than just potential sources of fundraising revenue or clicks on action buttons. They should be viewed and treated as insiders, a real part of your organization, and not just as a target for delivering messages. Also realize that a your supporter base is a resource that grows with use – the more you exercise your supporter network, the stronger it gets, and the more valuable it will be to your organization.
It’s about more than money
A holistic approach to online engagement encourages donors to express their support through more than just giving money. The list of active “roles†that your supporters can — and often will - play includes: volunteers, advocates, defenders, communicators, researchers, mobilizers, analysts and more.
Connect with individuals, not masses
Online engagement is not about delivering messages to mass audience - it’s about crafting a meaningful relationship with each individual member of your constituency. This is where the techniques and approaches of fundraising can be of great value. Fundraising is all about individual engagement – it’s the stock and trade of developing and delivering messages that motivate people/foundations and corporations to give money. These techniques and approaches may be equally applied to other areas of constituent relations – in all of the active support roles indicated above. Individual engagement is not about mass marketing or mass mobilization/activism – which are more concerned with the size/action/impact of the crowd than with motivations/opinions/commitment of the individual actor. Communication/marketing is about delivering messages – constituent engagement is about building relationships.
Next> Part Two: Principles of Online Engagement
By irishg
March 1st, 2005 at 10:07pm
Under Trendspotting+ What's working+ fundraising
If you are like me, you get countless e-newsletters in your inbox throughout the day. I subscribe to lots of them. I can’t help it. I am just so curious to find out what’s new. Whether its fundraising, advocacy, news or technology I gotta know. The hard part is deciding which ones do I read, delete, or even worse dragged into a folder to be read “sometime”.
With non-profits engaging in cultivating their donors, an e-newsletter is a good method to keep their supporters in touch with current happenings. But if supporters subscribe to multiple charity e-newsletters, news feeds, how do non-profits get an edge and differentiate themselves from other charities and other e-newsletters?
There are services available from Sweet Talk Studios that can greatly enrich your e-mail, newsletters and website content with audio and video functionality. How would this work? Say for instance you work with a children’s charity, can you imagine how much more moving it would be for supporters to hear the sound of children’s laughter when they open your email? Or for university alumni, to click on a link to relive a winning touchdown at an important football game. There are endless possibilities for this application. It could add the wow factor to your e-newsletter, email or even your website.
The audio component can also be vitally important when communication is critical, like in the case with the Asian Tsunami. The Salvation Army USA World Service Office has effectively integrated audio appeals on their website to provide updates of the Tsunami Relief efforts and as a method to ask for funding. The message lends a sense of urgencey, emotion, and a platform to to reach out to the world.
By Francis Lim
February 25th, 2005 at 09:32am
Under Trendspotting+ fundraising
We have known from the times of “Band Aid” and “We are the World” musicians have been on the forefront of raising social consciousness and have been willing to lend their names and talents for a good cause. In those days all we could do to lend our support is buy the tapes. But now, thanks to improvement in technology we can do…oh so much more.
The One World Beat Global Music Festival combines technology, a love for music, and raising money for global concerns. Musicians from all different genres will be performing a series of concerts simultaneously from March 18-27, 2005. These events will be run from Nigeria, to Romania to Costa Rica. Can’t make the shows? No problem, you can log into the website One World Beat Global Music Festival and listen to webcasts of the performances, hear live interviews with the artists, download music from the broadcast, bid on auction items or make a donation to their campaign “Give a child a chance.”
Running simultaneous events is something international charities should consider doing to channel momentum, and maximize marketing opportunities. It is the logical progression to running individual events in separate countries.
By Francis Lim