What's working
May 16th, 2009 at 04:56pm
Under What's working+ fundraising+ social networks
Great coverage from Philly.com of stories from national nonprofits using social networks for fundraising:
Living Beyond Breast Cancer has won supporters for one of its
biggest fund-raisers with e-mail blasts, brochures, and personal calls
to big donors.
But that’s so yesterday.
For the first time, the nonprofit based in Haverford is posting to
its new Facebook page information on this year’s Yoga Unites event,
which takes place Sunday. It also is tweeting on Twitter as @YU4LBBC
and uploading video to YouTube.
Of course, Living Beyond also blogs, and it shares photos on Flickr,
including one of women saluting the sun on the steps of the Art Museum,
where the annual Yoga Unites takes place.
As a result, the number of teams signed up for the event has nearly tripled, the group reports.
That’s the bottom-line promise of “social giving,” which uses online
networks to raise awareness and, ultimately, money. Organizations with
a cause are “friend-raising” on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and
elsewhere to bolster that old-as-money objective: fund-raising.
> Read the Full Article
By irishg
March 25th, 2008 at 05:58pm
Under What's working+ fundraising
A new research report has been released addressing the role of that internet plays in fundraising for larger gifts. The Wired Wealthy: Using the Internet to Connect with your Middle and Major donors is a joint study by Convio, Edge Research, and SeaChange Strategies into the online behaviors and preferences of major and middle donors. It shows that there is significant room for improvement in the way nonprofits meet their online needs.
This study suggests that an “Internet communications gap” exists between higher dollar donors and charities. In short, most causes are not making the best possible use of their Web and email efforts to connect with this critically important audience.
The report is available for download here.
By irishg
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 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 20th, 2005 at 05:26am
Under What's working+ fundraising
John Wiley & Sons have published a new book for nonprofits looking to improve their use of the Internet: Nonprofit Internet Strategies: Best Practices for Marketing, Communications and Fundraising. The book was developed with the participation of the ePhilanthropy Foundation, and is a collection of articles by authors recognized by the foundation as experts in the field.
Brian Walsh of Changing our World has posted a review of the book.
Michael Stein from GetActive has also posted a review — here’s a quote:
This book should revitalize the debate about the need for nonprofits to develop comprehensive Internet strategies that tie together fundraising, marketing, and communications efforts. Too often, these efforts are happening in different parts of the organization, and too few agencies have had the foresight to bring them together.
It can be ordered direct from Wiley here.
By irishg
March 15th, 2005 at 05:18am
Under What's working+ fundraising
While some charities have relied on live auctions, silent auctions, online auctions as a staple of their fundraising efforts, there is a new choice to add to the auction mix; SMS. An SMS auction, allows participants to key in their bids via text message.
In February 2005, the GSM (Global System for Mobile Communication) Association and their partners hosted an international text messaging auction with the proceeds directed to UNICEF. Bidding commenced on January 24 and ran until February 17th. To sign-up for the auction, participants texted a registration message. To enter a bid the registrants would key in the auction code (e.g. FILM) with their bid amount. In this case, there was no premium rate charged for any of the bids sent. The text bids were received from six different continents, and over €90,000 was raised for UNICEF in combination with a live auction.
This charity auction is a promising start to opening channels for charities and constituents to communicatie by SMS. In order to take advantage of SMS functionality, charities need to start collecting supporter cellphone numbers. In this regard, it is becoming increasingly important to look at how to provide value added incentives for new or existing SMS charity supporters. An auction is one example of how this could pay off for a charity.
By Francis Lim
March 15th, 2005 at 05:17am
Under What's working+ fundraising
Following the Asian Tsumani, the world experienced a “flash philanthropy†event on an unprecedented scale that has left relief and development nonprofits with an unusual problem — what to do with all of these new donors?
In the massive public response to the event, millions of dollars in one-time relief gifts were donated by people who do not regularly give to overseas emergency and development causes. The recipient NGOs are facing a challenge now to understand what these tens of thousands of new donors represent in terms of long-term growth of their donor lists. Their next step is to effectively engage these new donors in a stewardship program that maintains them as active donors in the future.
However, previous experience of flash philanthropy events, such as 9/11 and the 2003 earthquake in Iran, has shown that online donors who make single-gifts in response to high-profile events such as natural disasters, humanitarian crises, and advocacy/action campaigns do not respond well to traditional renewal messaging that organizations use with their existing donor base. Flash Philanthropy donors are a distinct category of donor, requiring a specific stewardship approach to increase their renewal and retention over long-term and annual cycles.
One of the keys to understanding flash philanthropy donors n is to recognize that their gift was primarily motivated by the nature of the crisis and not by the organization. Often, these donors selected the organization as a convenient channel for “doing something to help”, and it should not be assumed that they have any great interest in supporting other programs within the organization, or even in supporting the organization’s work in general.
The focus of communications to these donors, then, should be squarely rooted in the primary event that motivated their first gift. Moving them to a long-term giving commitment may be most effectively accomplished by transforming that story of immediate, emergency needs into a story of long-term needs.
For organizations that are regionally focused and have long-standing programs on the ground in the affected regions, the primary message to deliver to flash philanthropy donors is about the need for a commitment to the reconstruction effort that may take months or years. Their gift was just the start of the process, and that if they want to make a real contribution to the well-being of the affected population, they need to make a commitment to be there for the reconstruction as well as the relief. The organiztaion they gave their donation to is committed to be there for the longer term, and, as donors, they should be equally committed.
For organizations working on crisis response and development issues all around the world, the key message for engaging flash philanthropy donors should be one of preparedness for future crises. Donors can be engaged to hekp ensure that systems are developed to better respond to emergencies. Lives can be saved if we follow the motto to “be prepared”, and a continuing commitment from donors will help protect vulnerable people in the future.
These are just starting points, and each organization will need to nuance their own messaging campaigns to convert as many one-time relief donors into monthly reconstruction donors as possible.
Comments and views on this topic are especially welcome (click on the Comments link below)
By irishg
March 8th, 2005 at 09:15am
Under What's working+ fundraising
Alex Steffen over at Worldchanging.com is profiling a new PSA campaign from Mine Action and the anti-landmine movement:
[The PSA]opens with a scene of idyllic suburban tranquility. A young family cheers on their daughter who has just scored a goal in her soccer match when she suddenly, violently explodes. Chaos consumes the scene while the mother of the victim shrieks hysterically and her father cradles her lifeless body. A simple graphic reads: “If there were landmines here, would you stand for landmines anywhere? Help the U.N. eradicate landmines everywhere.”
It’s a powerful piece, and just the latest example of shock-and-awe media campaigning for progressive causes.
The strategy stems from the view that in today’s over-stimulated 5000 channel mediasphere the only way to get a message through is to create a high-impact ad campaign that pushes the boundaries of visceral and emotional acceptance. This is the same approach used in a recent series of graphic prostate cancer PSA ads where doctors in an operating theatre extract a ticking time-bomb from an unfortunate man’s rectum. That PSA was banned from some major TV networks, which created a wave of extra publicity for the cause. Already there are signs that the anti-landmine PSA may be too hard-hitting for some TV networks, such as CNN.
The Internet offers an alternative medium for high-impact PSAs that get shut out of traditional mainstream media. Nothing spreads through the Internet faster than an idea, or meme, that catches on. File exchange networks — like Kazaa and BitTorrent, where surfers swap copyrighted music can also be used to quickly pass video ads throughout the Internet community.
In fact, a quick google on the net shows there may be something starting, as there is already a series of references to “the landmine ad that no one will broadcast”. In the end, that profile may be the most effective route for getting the anti-landmine message out.
By irishg
March 6th, 2005 at 08:29pm
Under Learning from the South+ What's working
Colleague Jodi Tonita at One/Northwest reminded me about the Global Rich List site, which takes the ‘guilty conscience’ approach to motivate donations to a whole new level. The site invites visitors to type in their annual incomes and discover where they place in terms of global wealth. The result for most first-world web surfers is well within in the top 10% of the scale, and the site then invites the visitor to make a donation, now that they realize they are so wealthy…
The Global Rich List site was built by UK web developers Poke, who describe their thinking as follows:
We are obsessed with wealth. But we gauge how rich we are by looking upwards at those who have more than us. This makes us feel poor.
We wanted to do something which would help people understand, in real terms, where they stand globally. And make us realise that in fact most of us (who are able to view this web page) are in the privileged minority.
We want people to feel rich. And give some of their ‘extra’ money to a worthwhile charity.
It’s an innovative approach, and well executed, but I’m not sure that guilt is the best motivator for giving. Donor relationships develop best when they are based on a more positive motivation –that the donor is part of making something good happen, rather than jst assauging a feeling of guilt.
Still, more than six-thousand pounds have been donated via the Global Rich List site, so it seems to be touching a chord with some visitors..
At any rate, here’s my own personal confession:
By irishg
