Giving in a digital world

Digital fundraising thoughts and news

Archive for August, 2007

A quick reminder about Google’s free advertising programme for charities

Posted by Bryan on August 28, 2007

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Everyone with a website, or a blog, will know the importance of using search engine marketing (SEM) to help drive traffic their way. However, based on a couple of recent conversations I’ve had, what not everyone knows is that Google funds a special programme to make this easier for registered nonprofits operating in 16 countries around the world.

Called Google Grants, it offers at least three months of free advertising through its AdWords advertising product to organisations it selects based on an online application process.

Google Grants recipients are only chosen every three months and after completing the online application form you will be informed within six months whether you have been awarded a grant. So, if you are currently using SEM – or have a website and haven’t yet tested it – take a look at their website and see if you can get yourself some free AdWords advertising.

Posted in Online advertising | 1 Comment »

Facebook fundraising apps – a brief review

Posted by Bryan on August 24, 2007

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There’s been a lot of interest in my post about the growth in users of the Justgiving Facebook app last week, so I thought it might be useful to provide a brief review of what other fundraising apps are currently available – to help give a broader picture of how fundraisers are starting to use this new online platform:

Causes (2,973,966 users at the time of writing)
The most popular fundraising and campaigning app by a massive margin, Causes from Project Agape is currently the 18th most popular app of any on Facebook. It enables you to choose from over a million registered 501(c)(3) US organisations, add their logo to your profile and then make donations and recruit others to your chosen cause – with the total raised and recruited being displayed within the app. Apparently they’re working on being able to add non-US based organisations, but no joy as yet. However, this certainly isn’t stopping non-US Facebook users from getting involved and raising funds – it’s just a bit frustrating for non-US fundraisers who would love to add their organisations to the list.

(UPDATE: one year on from the launch of Causes read the 12 month user statistics here.)

Change.org (6,126 users)
Developed by Change.org, the US-based social network for social activism, this app enables user to “get involved with over 1 million nonprofits and hundreds of political campaigns”. However, like Causes, as far as I can tell all organisations involved are currently US-based.

Justgiving (5,101 users)
One for UK fundraisers. From Justgiving.com, the leading company in the UK enabling individuals and groups to create individual fundraising pages and collect donations for sponsored events. Their app links an individual’s Justgiving fundraising page to their profile and adds a ‘dynamic progress bar’ to show how their fundraising is going.

Chipin (3,307 users)
An app from the creators of chipin.com, a website which enables individuals or groups to create personal fundraising webpages or post fundraising widgets to their website, blog, or MySpace pages.

The NSPCC (588 users)
From the UK’s largest children’s charity the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, this app enables you to find-out about events as well as make a donation through a link to the charity’s secure online donation page.

UNICEF UK (490 users)
This places a button on your profile displaying the UNICEF ‘Born Free from HIV’ campaign logo which links-through to the UNICEF campaign donation webpage. There’s also a link to the UNICEF Darfur Emergency Appeal Facebook Group. Functionality exists to select alternative campaigns, but none seem to have been added as yet.

Sponsor me (286 users)
Supporting credit/debit card and PayPal donations, ‘Sponsor me’ is described as “A great new way to collect or send money for any purpose. Anyone can donate money by sponsoring you, show off their support for campaign or simply leave a message”. It just launched at the start of August and has 286 users so far.

So, there you have it. In the short time since Facebook opened-up and allowed 3rd parties to develop apps it’s great to see that fundraisers have begun to investigate how they might capitalise on this new opportunity to reach audiences online.

What remains to be seen is just how effective different types of fundraising apps will be for actually generating significant amounts of income for individual organisations. Those apps which essentially extend the reach of event-based fundraising, like Justgiving, certainly have the potential to contribute to the raising of significant sums. However, the pure income value of a listing within an app like Causes seems less clear to me.

This question was raised back in early June by Erin Teeling in a post about Causes on the Bivings Report blog, where she highlighted the fact that despite membership for several causes being very high the amounts raised were actually very low. At that time, for the 225 causes she reviewed the average raised was just $0.05 per member. Which is fine if you see Facebook as an online small change collection tin – but I’d hope that it offers far more potential than that.

Only time – and testing – will tell how best the new opportunities available to nonprofits for raising awareness and engaging with Facebook users can best be translated into hard cash. If any readers are already enjoying real fundraising success through a Facebook app and are willing to share their learnings, or if you spot any other great apps – then do let me know.

<Update – you can see how the new Facebook ‘User Engagement’ approach to app measurement changes the way these fundraising apps are ranked in this post>

Posted in Facebook, Fundraising, Social networking | 6 Comments »

Blogging goes green – through Blog Action Day

Posted by Bryan on August 20, 2007

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Last week saw the launch of Blog Action Day, an international initiative aiming to unite thousands of blogging voices and have them talk about one specific issue on one specific day – with the aim being to further global awareness of that issue and so contribute to bringing about positive change.

The inaugural Blog Action Day is scheduled for October 15th 2007, and the issue that its organisers are asking bloggers from around the world to focus on is the environment. As well as dedicating that day’s posts to reporting on issues relating to the environment, bloggers who make money from their sites are also being asked to donate the day’s earnings to environmental charities.

I’ve added this blog and the other one I contribute to – livinginadigitalworld.com – to the 1,300-plus already registered, and will be seeking-out relevant fundraising topics to blog about come the day. If you author a blog – on any subject at all – then do take a look at their site and consider adding your voice to this innovative global initiative.

Posted in Blogging | Leave a Comment »

A busy week for nonprofit brands in Second Life

Posted by Bryan on August 19, 2007

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Last week was particularly busy in terms of the activities of nonprofit organisations in Second Life, with WWF unveiling its ‘Conservation Island’ plus the formal launch of the Nonprofit Commons community – providing free virtual office space and advice for nonprofits wanting to get started in the virtual world.

Nonprofit Commons launched on Tuesday, with 60 people in San Francisco joining over 100 online in Second Life at the launch event. Supported by Second Life entrepreneur Anshe Chung, Nonprofit Commons offers nonprofits new to Second Life a free parcel of land including an empty office, which they can then use as a base to trial different activities.

Then on Thursday, WWF formally unveiled its own Second Life presence, ‘Conservation Island’. When you visit, you find yourself at the foot of a waterfall looking out over a short street and an orang-utan in an ice-cream van. From there you can visit various displays explaining different aspects of WWF’s work, from bycatch to climate change.

It’s great to see WWF addressing global issues using the global medium of Second Life. However, I’m sad to say that Conservation Island really doesn’t make the most of Second Life’s interactive potential – and as a result I fear it’s not going to achieve the level of engagement and education that it could have done. There are all of the usual things, like links out to the WWF site and free branded avatar clothing, but that’s about it. In many cases the animals I spotted around the island couldn’t be interacted with at all. Overall, it feels rather like a missed opportunity, which continued development will hopefully help address.

Over recent months Second Life has been receiving quite a lot of negative media coverage. Time Magazine went so far as to include Second Life in its five worst websites list and Wired got in on the act too, with an article about corporate marketers wasting millions trying to establish a brand presence in Second Life.

Reports like these are a natural counter-balance to the incredible hype Second Life has received over the last 6 to 12 months. As a fairly regular visitor I can confirm that it really doesn’t live-up to the type of PR-spin which has people expecting a truly lifelike virtual world – but that’s no reason to right it off as completely pointless.

Set aside the fact that the graphics are not up to the quality of the latest gaming consoles, that only some 30k of its claimed 8m residents are ever online at the same time, and that if more than 70 people visit a single place then the whole thing grinds to a halt. What we have here is still a fascinating experiment in online social networking, enabling people from all around the world to communicate and interact with each other in a new and potentially highly creative way.

That said, I’m not advocating that it come first in every organisation’s list of Web 2.0 marketing plans. I simply believe that it shouldn’t be ruled-out without fair consideration.

Second Life’s potential for good was amply illustrated by last month’s wonderfully well designed and executed Second Life Relay for Life, raising over $110k for the American Cancer Society – and hopefully the Nonprofit Commons initiative will enable many more good causes to test new ideas and reach new audiences through this innovative online environment.

Posted in Second Life, Social networking, Web 2.0 | 3 Comments »

Justgiving Facebook fundraising app doing great

Posted by Bryan on August 14, 2007

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Shortly after Facebook became the first online social network site to allow 3rd party developers to create applications integrating directly with user data back in May 2007 (more on this here if you missed it), the folks at Justgiving.com came-up with their own app to enable Facebook users to add a neat ‘dynamic progress bar’ to their profile to show how fundraising through their individual Justgiving page is progressing.

The good news is that, according to today’s post on the Justgiving.com blog, in just a couple of months users of the app have now passed the 4,000-mark.

This on the same day that the FT reported that Facebook has just entered the UK’s top 20 most popular online destinations – continuing the trend I mentioned last month.

So, any charities with supporters raising funds for them through Justgiving fundraising pages – should be sure to let them know about the Facebook app, just incase they’re amongst the ever growing number of Facebook users. Alternately, any charity developing its own Facebook group – here’s a seamless way to integrate fundraising directly into it.

Interestingly, I’ve just noticed that in the 15 minutes or so since I took the screen shot above showing 4,367 Justgiving Facebook app users – the number showing on the Facebook application page has now risen to 4,374. That’s around 1 new user every two minutes – which can’t be bad!

Infact, that sort of growth fits with some equally amazing Justgiving stats listed in an earlier posting on their blog – including the fact that on average a Justgiving fundraising page is made every 1 minute and 9 seconds, and that a donation is made every 7.8 seconds!

Update 24/08/07 – you can read about the other main Facebook fundraising apps currently available here

Posted in Facebook, Fundraising, Social networking, Sponsored events, Web 2.0 | 3 Comments »

Kiva – an example of online fundraising at its best

Posted by Bryan on August 9, 2007

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Quite a bit has already been written online and offline praising Kiva, a charity harnessing the power of online social networking to enable everyday donors to directly support micro enterprise projects around the world.

However, just incase you haven’t heard of them, I thought I’d mention them here too – because as one of their ‘lenders’ (the lady above is Mrs Edowu in Togo, whose bicycle repair business I’m helping fund) I think their approach is fantastic, and because I think it can teach us all some very useful online fundraising lessons.

Kiva works like this: on its website it displays profiles of small business owners who need funding – typically around $1,000. You simply select the project you like the sound of and then contribute by credit card to its loan pool, in units of $25. Once the full funding is reached, the loan is disbursed via a local microcredit field partner. Over the next 18 months or so, the recipient pays it back on a monthly basis – with you receiving email updates as their business progresses. Once the money is paid back, you’re free to loan your share to another project. I’m no microfinance expert, but it seems like a wonderful idea to me – and I really enjoy being part of it.

But, what can we learn from Kiva for our own online fundraising? Well, here are just three things that occur to me – take a visit to their site and it’s sure to spark more ideas for you.

Firstly – I get a completely free choice as to which projects I wish to support – so, immediately I am more engaged. The internet enables us to do this without massive administration hassles – yet I know of very few charities who currently use technology to offer donors such personal choice.

Secondly – while other charities send me wizzy e-newsletters full of information of little relevance to me, it is my simple Kiva text emails that I really enjoy receiving – because they are ‘real’ updates about projects I have specifically chosen to support. The technology to enable complete personalisation of email communications is now pretty accessible – yet most organisations still use the same one size fits all ‘batch blast’ approach.

Thirdly – Kiva really understands the power of network marketing. As well as structuring their whole site like a social network – so I can see the profiles of all of the other ‘lenders’ to my projects – they also make it very easy to promote the site to your friends. From suggested email footer text to downloadable banner ads. Given how personally engaging the whole experience is, I’m sure ‘lender get lender’ recruitment must work a treat for them.

Posted in Email, Social networking, Web 2.0 | Leave a Comment »

 
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