Last week YouTube launched a new feature called ‘Call to Action’ for Non-profit Partners, allowing them to place overlay ads linking direct to their own website on their YouTube videos – for free. The clickable ads can direct viewers to any webpage, such as a secure donation page – essentially making YouTube videos into online DRTV ads.
To test the new feature, last Sunday YouTube placed a video for charity:water on its homepage, complete with a clickable overlay encouraging viewers to donate to fund water wells – and generated a very impressive $10,000 in donations in one day. So it certainly seems to work!
Before you get too excited about the potential to upload your latest video, add an overlay, and sit back as the money just rolls-in, you need to bear in mind that the test video was on the YouTube homepage – which guaranteed it a whole load of traffic.
However, ‘Call to Action’ still represents an opportunity not to be missed for any non-profit with good quality video content looking to find a way to monetise their YouTube uploads. At least it does for US and UK non-profits – as I’m afraid that at present YouTube’s Non-profit Partner Programme is only available to organisations from those two countries. Although they are apparently intending to expand the programme.
So, if you’re a UK or US non-profit what’s stopping you? Click here to register as a Non-profit Partner and then all you need to do is go to ‘edit Video’ and complete the ‘Call to Action’ fields for your headline, promotional copy, and destination URL. If you’re feeling really adventurous you could even combine clickable overlays with YouTube’s ‘annotations’ functionality to develop interactive direct response ads.
And do leave a comment to let me know how you get on with it.
Time seems to be flying by this year. It seems like just the other day we kicked-off the new year and now it’s pretty well the end of March already. All of which means that I really need to get down to work on three conference sessions that I’m scheduled to present over the next few months.
It’s always great to meet folks who read Giving in a Digital World at conferences, and I’m also always on the look-out for new case studies to help illustrate them – so I thought I’d share the details here to see if anyone can suggest any great new examples of nonprofit online community activity for me to include.
First-up will be a couple of workshops for the recently announced IFC Online conference in May. Described as “the world’s first global, virtual fundraising conference”, IFC Online will take place completely on the internet and comprise three days of live, interactive sessions from 12th to 14th May. To provide as close to a truly global conference as possible, the live sessions are being presented twice, at times selected to make them as convenient as possible wherever you log-on from. I’m scheduled to present on ‘The future of fundraising in our networked society’ at 6pm London time on Wednesday 13th and again 11am London time on Thursday 14th (you can see the full conference session timetable for different timezones here). Should be an interesting experience presenting via an online platform and Skype, although not having any visible audience reactions is going to be a bit odd. For full details of the conference check-out the main IFC Online website here.
From 6th to 8th July it’s the 2009 National Fundraising Convention in London, where I’ll be presenting one of the ‘Big Picture’ sessions, again looking at the challenges and opportunities we face when fundraising with today’s networked society consumers.
Then, in October it’s the International Fundraising Congress in Holland where I’m co-presenting a session with Jonathan Waddingham from Justgiving, sharing some new insights into online community fundraising from an analysis of the million or so individual donors using Justgiving and Firstgiving.
So, if you’re attending any of these conferences and get along to one of my sessions do come and say hello (or IM me, or whatever, if you log on to IFC online). And don’t forget, I’m always on the hunt for new case studies – so if you’ve seen anything that’s particularly impressed you do let me know by leaving a comment.
Development charity ActionAid took to the streets this week with a novel approach to publicise today’s ‘Put People First’ protest march through London, in the form of The MegaMouth – a megaphone-equipped superhero shouting-out slogans provided by the general public via SMS and Twitter.
Followed by a camera crew providing video updates to the ActionAid website and quik.com, and a Twitterer providing a live commentary, The MegaMouth has roamed the streets of London for the last week shouting-out submitted slogans about everything from climate change to anti-capitalism. Including a suitably arboreal contribution from The Woodland Trust’s Head of Campaigns (aka ‘EdWoodlandTrust’) with “Hey G20 LEAF our planet alone, we’re SYCAMORE you lot doing nothing when WILLOW you listen?” and an ’80s-inspired “Obama Obama let’s have some drama: stop the bonuses, feed the world and give us more Bananarama.” from ‘Mel’.
Some folks didn’t quite seem to get the point of it all, as exemplified by the message “I love you Mum! Sorry I forgot mothers day.”! But in the main it’s a fun and distinctive way for ActionAid to get people talking about the issues surrounding the G20 meeting and an innovative use of Twitter to give people a voice in the debate.
Today is apparently the 20th birthday of the World Wide Web! So, why not celebrate this great day by taking a little time to stretch your thinking about the Web just a bit.
Go on, make yourself a cup of tea, relax… and watch the great TED video above, in which Tim Berners-Lee explains how he invented the World Wide Web – and sheds some light on how he believes his brainchild will evolve in the future.
In this short talk, Berners-Lee explains how the World Wide Web all began because he wanted to refine the way we use information and work together – and, apparently, because his boss humoured him and agreed that he could spend time on it on the side as a “play project”. All bosses with bright staff – take note!.
It goes without saying that this particular play project ended-up revolutionising our lives through the way the Web links documents together online.
But this is just the beginning. The future, Berners-Lee explains, will comprise evolving from the current ‘linked documents’ approach to a ‘linked data’ approach. This is the next revolution. Releasing, repurposing, and re-using the infinite wealth of data we collate – from medical research databases to data on relationships held on social networking sites – by linking it up in previously unconsidered ways to support previously unachievable applications.
This revolution has already started, with the ever increasing number of of APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) being launched – from Facebook to Kiva – which enable the data traditionally held within websites to be accessed, combined with data from other sources, and re-purposed in an infinite number of new ways (such as Google Maps mash-ups).
It might take a second, stronger, cup of tea – perhaps with sugar – for you to start to consider what this means for your own Web activity. Could you release the information you currently only share through ‘documents’ on your website for others to use and share on your behalf? What implications will this mean for your future web architecture and implementations? And what benefits might this bring, given the challenges of marketing within today’s highly savvy and highly connected networked society?
Understanding how the specific consumer groups that make-up your target audiences are adopting and using digital channels is fundamental to developing successful programmes to engage with them online. Unfortunately, if you don’t have a chunky consumer research budget you may well feel that you have no way of gaining the type of detailed insights you need to support your planning.
However, if you keep a look-out then chances are you’ll find that every so often some great reports are made available completely free of charge that can give you just the type of information you need.
Admittedly, as a long-time consumer planner with a specific interest in digital marketing who heads-up a team of strategy and consumer insight specialists, I’m a bit obsessive when it comes to monitoring how different segments of the consumer market use technology – and over the years I’ve learned where to look for specific things. But it really doesn’t take that much effort to do some careful Google searches and keep your eyes open for news of reports being released – and the insight you can get as a result could really help your online planning
Case in point, just last month digital agency Razorfish and Social Network CafeMom made available a great report entitled ‘Digital Mom’, packed with information about how mothers are using the internet.
Based on a survey of 1,500 ‘digital moms’ (or mums, depending where you are), defined as women with at least one child aged under 18 in the home who are active online, the report provides a wide range of information into how they use the internet and how this usage changes as their children grow up, as well as specific profiles of their online social network use.
If mums are your target audience (or even moms), well worth a read – and a handy reminder of the quality of free consumer insight reports that can be found online if you keep your browser eyes open.
Just a few weeks behind the originally planned launch date (which is pretty impressive for a development of this complexity) the online fundraising site formerly known as Play it Forward and now renamed Pifworld went live over the weekend.
I’ve been watching the development of Pifworld with interest over the last few months, for a couple of reasons. Partly because it is the latest of a number of innovative online community fundraising developments to recently come from the Netherlands, where the whole concept of online community fundraising has really taken off over the last 18 months or so. But also because pre-launch announcements suggested that Pifworld would offer a very different online user experience to that of established charity project crowdfunding sites like Kiva and Globalgiving – and indeed it does.
At the outset, in addition to the usual project search functionality we’re used to seeing, Pifworld’s project inventory is displayed on an interactive globe (shown above) that you can spin and zoom to see what they have available in any particular area of the world you might be interested in. All within a main screen that also displays latest funding and supporter data. This might sound like an unnecessary novelty, but actually works really well and is a fun and engaging way to see what’s going-on.
Then, when you find a project that looks like it might be of interest, in place of the traditional text and photo-based project funding request, Pifworld projects are promoted through neat little video interviews with key project staff who explain the project aims, activities, and needs – like the woman below explaining her project in India.
Now, other fundraising sites have certainly used video in places to help illustrate project activities. But I’m not aware of any which have taken the next natural step of replacing text and photo project reviews (which are often little more than on-screen versions of good old direct mail leaflets) with a far more authentic and engaging video presentation. Pifworld project updates are also video-based, so you can really see (and hear) what the team have been doing with your donation.
Unfortunately at this stage, once you’ve found the project you’re interested in, the user experience slips a bit – as the online donation process seems a bit more complex than usual. Donations are made from a Pifworld ‘wallet’ which you first have to upload 5 Euro ‘credits’ to. This can be done from vouchers or using most major credit cards (at an added transaction cost of around 1 Euro) but the overall process feels a lot less streamlined than I’ve experienced on other sites. Also the confirmation email doesn’t arrive immediately (I’m still waiting for mine). For all that I love other aspects of the site, I think this payment process could do with another look – given that it’s fundamentally what the whole site is about. It wouldn’t be the first time that an apparently very engaging online fundraising site failed to maximise income simply because insufficient thought had been given to the back-office functionality. Hopefully the Pifworld team will be watching their site analytics to ensure that people are completing their transactions and will fix this if not.
Beyond this, another very nice feature is the way that project advocacy has been built into Pifworld, with people encouraged not only to become Supporters but also Ambassadors for their chosen projects – with blogging facilities provided to help Ambassadors mobilise their personal online networks. There is also email promotional functionality and project details can be shared as an Open Social widget (although only by copying the widget URL and not through a simple pushbutton which is becoming the norm elsewhere).
So all-in-all, a fun and engaging site that will hopefully prove attractive to potential online donors of all ages – with a few wrinkles to iron-out over the coming months. Definitely a site to keep an eye-on.
Meantime, if you’re interested in what else is happening in online community fundraising in the Netherlands, then it’s worth taking a look at 1procentclub.nl and geefsamen.nl (thanks to Victor for those). As well as the latest implementation of the YoCo fundraising platform from my old colleagues at WWAV Holland, which has raised almost 1 million Euros in sponsorship donations for cancer charity KWF Kankerbestrijding’s Alpe d’HuZes cycling challenge just a couple of months after going live.
